Trans Verse (or, Traver’s Tranifesto)

by Traver Pam Dick   1   Then one moment it dawned on me, I turned into Traver. 2   Crossroads like of philosophy and lit.  Poetry and fiction. 3   Prose poem qua transverse.  Lines as stanzas, steps in weird proofs, notes.  Traver got blue shoulders. 4   Forms are aspect shifts.  Facing different directions.  Two faces, hourglass.  Duck-rabbit.  Dick-Traver.  Mode swings. 5   It’s too hot in here, … Continue reading Trans Verse (or, Traver’s Tranifesto)

The Black Hole Between Science and Art

In a famous 1959 essay entitled “The Two Cultures,” C.P Snow argued that the sciences and humanities were at a serious impasse, suffering from “mutual incomprehension.” The lack of common ground made communication between the two cultures difficult if not impossible. Due to accelerated overspecialization, suspicion ran high in both camps. To illustrate the climate of cultural paranoia that existed in America in the 1950s, … Continue reading The Black Hole Between Science and Art

To the End of Ezra Pound

by Nicholas A. DeBoer I. Biographical/Introductory Who is he to be evil?  A toppled man. people don’t change.  They only stand more revealed.” (Olson, Maximus to Gloucester: Letter 2) Within the infinite losses of sixteen million humans in the Great War, including T.E. Hulme & Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ezra Pound felt a loss that echoed throughout the 20s.  Combined with his own judgment of failure as … Continue reading To the End of Ezra Pound

All About Praxis

Part 1: Queer Rhetoric and the Therapy of Watching Movies   Judith Halberstam, in “Shame and White Gay Masculinity,” her response to the University of Michigan’s 2003 conference at the University of Michigan on Gay Shame, worried about the potentiality for projecting that shame in other, identity-based ways (her article particularly concerned around race).  Certainly Michael Warner anticipated this in The Trouble With Normal when … Continue reading All About Praxis

Taking Its Pulse: Poetry in the Context of Narrative Medicine

Since its introduction to US medical schools in the early 1970s, interest in literature and medicine has steadily gathered steam, blossoming into a full-fledged academic field featuring a broad range of theories, sub-disciplines, and competing methodologies. Literature & Medicine, launched in 1982, has served as the principal forum for growth and serious conversation around the subject, publishing side-by-side the work of health educators, bioethicists, linguists, … Continue reading Taking Its Pulse: Poetry in the Context of Narrative Medicine

Toward a Definition of Collaboration: Collaborative Authorship in the Arts

Over the last three decades art-theorists and critics have begun to pay more attention to both collaborative teams and collaboration as subjects of enquiry. Around the time this study formally began in 2003, ‘collaboration’ emerged at the forefront of artistic trends and debates: In 2003, the Chapman Brothers were nominated for the Turner Prize as a collaborative team; in 2004 Third Text dedicated an entire … Continue reading Toward a Definition of Collaboration: Collaborative Authorship in the Arts

Olson Meets Web 2.0

Let’s say that Charles Olson, who fretted about the short life-spans of his male ancestors as an indicator of his early death in “The K” (Olson, Selected 159), does not die in 1970 at the age of 59. Worn out, he goes underground and just observes the culture for a very long time. In full possession of his faculties, he turns a century old in … Continue reading Olson Meets Web 2.0