“At first I thought you couldn’t really be a poet unless you’d killed yourself,” recalls one of the liveliest blog poets in our town, Jim Behrle. “So I was very interested in Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and they led me to Lowell,” without whom young Jim says he might have been […]
Stirling Newberry explains why we feel so blessed in this blogosphere. He knows the variety of voices and the dynamism of the space. He is himself part of the rebirth of remarkably clean, free and forceful politics online. And he knows how apt is the spherical image of this new linked, democratic, planetary zone we’re in. […]
Stirling Newberry speaks here about a telltale struggle with the Wesley Clark campaign which he helped create. He is the blogger who wrote earlier this month: “By the time you read these words the bell will be tolling for Wesley Clark’s candidacy.” And thus he crystallized a contest between people who drafted Clark and those who […]
Diana Der Hovanessian is a preeminent translator and advocate of Armenian poetry and herself a peculiarly affecting poet who brings a forgiving touch to unspeakable memory. “I write poetry because I can’t sing,” she says with a husky laugh. Like Elizabeth Bishop, she is a child of Worcester, Massachusetts. “A slight woman with flowing hair […]
Let’s hear it for the toolmakers. Scott Heiferman, 31, has become a central figure in the new Internet politics of 2004 on the strength of his magnetic Meetup.com. With a few professional partners in programming, Heiferman built the Meetup site that lets birds of a feather find and meet each other face-to-face in their own […]
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) is back, in spirit and in a massive new edition of Collected Poems. I feel him hovering again over a surreal presidential campaign. In Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam insurrection of 1967 and 1968, Lowell was the spooky presence often in the car with the candidate, or at his side, bearing witness as […]
Might Johannes Brahms’ E-minor Sonata for piano and cello have charms to soothe the savagery of the Arab-Israeli conflict? “No, I doubt it,” said Edward Said in our last conversation, with music, three years ago. “But it could produce quite extraordinary configurations like the one last summer in Weimar,” with 80 young musicians from the Middle East […]
In the mourning for Edward Said, the preeminent Palestinian public intellectual in America, several alert listeners have prompted me to liberate a remarkable interview that Professor Said gave me three years ago. Listen here. To me the striking thing on rehearing it is the degree to which the warrior intellectual, the controversialist of Orientalism, […]
Jeff Jarvis of Advance Publications, the Newhouse empire, was the other corporate media biggie at BloggerCon, making rather a striking contrast with the gentleman from The New York Times, Len Apcar. At BuzzMachine, of course, Jeff Jarvis is himself a voluminous and often counterintiutive blogger. He’s a liberal who was radicalized by September 11 and […]