June 2016

“One rainy day in the spring of 1960, the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan arrived at my door,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her essay “A Communal Poetry.”

We are left with the word vaudeville and little more than that. Vaudeville. We are left with traces: a few flat descriptions in books, some scratchy studio recordings, and what survives in early Hollywood.

June itself, not the girl but the month, has something about it of the unattainable, the unfulfilled promise. That is, paradoxically, because June, at least in the cities where I have spent my life, is the only reliably spring-like month.

The terms ‘precarity’ and its derivation, ‘precariat’/precariato gained notoriety after the 2001 Euro May Day parade when a network of casual workers, students, migrants, feminists, LGBT activists

Hamilton treats the classic so-called paradox of tragedy­ -- why do we enjoy representations of horrible things?­­ -- by suggesting, following Nietzsche, that we may resonate to the glories of poetic language and take comfort in "an illusion about the nature and value of suffering" as somehow ennobling or...

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, 1490-1510 by Ed Simon For its name literally meaning “No Place,” echoes of Utopia seem to be everywhere. Early autumn and a week before the pope’s visit and I am at the corner of 53rd and 5th, halfway between St. Patrick’s Cathedral...

‘The Future is Here – it is just not evenly distributed’ was the catch phrase for the Sydney Biennale, which closed this month. But the experience on offer forecasted an uneven future for a widely distributed art product.

I navigate an illness that makes me a protagonist of clichés. Sometimes, the thought of release is a dream of falling through clouds. My friend excitedly speaks about watching the northern lights from the cockpit of a plane — the whole kaleidoscopic spectacle, every inch of that cursive diffusion.

The medieval poem “Pearl” was written by someone whose identity we do not know, and is set mostly within a dream.