Review: ‘What Poets Are Like’ by Gary Soto
An acquaintance of mine recently had breakfast with Björk, an experience that involves being interrupted by strangers who just have to tell her what big fans they are. This is...
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Review: ‘My 1980s & Other Essays’ by Wayne Koestenbaum
Susan Sontag wrote that for Sartre, "all relations ... are analyzed as gestures of consciousness, appropriations of the other in the interminable self-definition of the self." If we interpret her...
‘Rejoicing’ by Bruno Latour and ‘Letters & Life’ by Bret Lott, Michael Robbins on religion
"I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the...
Review ‘The Guy Davenport Reader’ by Guy Davenport, edited by Erik Reece
Short version: Why are you reading this, when there's a new Guy Davenport anthology? Longer version: Guy Davenport died in 2005, a victim of chain-smoking, that most writerly of habits....
Review: ‘I Wear the Black Hat’ by Chuck Klosterman
I grew up on Def Leppard and Bon Jovi, so I was congenitally predisposed to like Chuck Klosterman's first book, "Fargo Rock City" (2001), an account of taking hair metal...
Review: ‘The Silence of Animals’ by John Gray
Liberal humanism is a delusion, progress is a myth, and as for the efforts of humans to save the planet, you might as well ask bedbugs to save the apartment...
Can song lyrics be considered poetry?
Because I use pop lyrics in my poems and review records for SPIN and elsewhere, people sometimes ask me whether I think of song lyrics as poetry. Looked at in...
The specter of Karl Marx
In October of 1861, an obscure foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune led his readers through recent American history — the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the bombardment...
Review: “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman
Like modern fantasy authors from Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis to Gene Wolfe and John Crowley, Neil Gaiman writes about the worlds on the edges of this...
A literary guide for beginners? Not so much
At the beginning of his new book, Terry Eagleton, best known for "Literary Theory: An Introduction," sounds like Harold Bloom, which is rarely a promising sign: "The art of analysing...