Works in translation and avant-garde American literature and poetry
Music
I enjoy sparkly rap videos on youtube sometimes.
Movies
Books
Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, George Oppen, Michael Palmer, William Saroyan, Susan Howe, Robert Creeley, Bernedette Mayer, Delmore Schwartz, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, Paul Auster, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Dylan Thomas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Thomas Merton, Henri Michaux, Amelie Nothomb, Céline, André Gide, Jean Paul Sartre, Apollinaire, Yukio Mishima, Italo Svevo, Tommaso Landolfi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kafka, Octavio Paz, Hermann Hesse, Eugenio Montale, Mallarme, Lorca, Nabokov, and most recently W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías, Roberto Bolaño, Inger Christensen, Gregory Rebassa, Jenny Erpenbeck, Uwe Timm, Yoko Tawada, Antonio Tabucchi, Bei Dao, Victor Pelevin, E.M. Forster, Muriel Spark, B. S. Johnson, and H. E. Bates.
About me: New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914 - 1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. "I asked Ezra Pound for 'career advice,'" James Laughlin recalled. "He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do 'something' useful." Intended "as a place where experimentalists could test their inventions by publication," the ND anthologies first introduced readers to the early work of such writers as Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, Louis Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Merton, John Hawkes, Denise Levertov, James Agee, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Soon after issuing the first of the anthologies, New Directions began publishing novels, plays, and collections of poems. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who once had difficulty finding publishers, were early New Directions authors and have remained at the core of ND's backlist of modernist writers.
Who I'd like to meet: Readers of first order literature.
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THE SMOKING POET: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS – WINTER 2008-09!
THE SMOKING POET publishes flash fiction; fiction; nonfiction; poetry; feature author interview; feature poet; feature artist; book and cigar reviews. We publish work that ignites our imagination, inflames our passion, leaves us with a smoky aftertaste. The Smoking Poet also shares an extensive list of links and resources for writers and the cigar aficionado.
Submissions open year round. Send with editor’s attention in subject line: poetry to Zinta Aistars; fiction to Russell Rowland; general non-fiction and cigar-themed fiction/ non-fiction/poetry and cigar reviews to J. Conrad Guest. For book reviews, please query first.
TSP’s FIRST ANNUAL POETRY CONTEST is also underway! Check our site for special submission guidelines. Honorary judge is poet extraordinaire, Dorianne Laux. Submissions not following guidelines will NOT be accepted. Winners published in Winter 2008-09 issue. $5 entry fee per 3 poems. Cash prizes. Subject line: “Contest/Last Name.”
Thanks for the add! I really appreciate your company. Hell, without New Directions, how would classic works that are too controversial to reprint and new works that break new ground ever get printed? Who else would print Pound's Cantos or Celine's Journey to the End of the Night? I'd be lost in literature without you guys, so keep up the good work.
Hello, New Directions. Directing your attention to “Potato I Have” at ELIMAE. It’s a derived text that tracks Joyce’s use of the potato - a talisman for Bloom - in Ulysses.
Let me remember only the starry explosion of our limbed violence. Let me see the faint reflection on my thighs, through the windowpane of stockings, the blue-green bruise of your bite. Let me wear the sweater you bought to match those marks day after day until it falls to ruin. Let me fall one more time into our night before I set it away away like a skein of white silk ribbon, thrown and unfurling in the blue-black sky. Let me call myself, “girl.” Your voice is silence. Your voice is the color of birds in mean flocks over the fields: a fast shadow, passing. Let me catch the ribbons falling from the sky and bind my wings tight. Erase this freedom, keep me bound in ecstasy. I do not want to fly. Constrain me in sorrow’s flaxen destruction. Let me have courage enough for your absence. Let me adore everything: every golden corner of your quiet soul, every splintered moment of your angry heart, let me take the palm prints from your gut and devour their slap-shaped wounds like so much memory candy, let me adore each child you ever longed for and girl you ever loved. Let me adore all of you the way I have for so many days. Let me. I’m soon to forget.
