Category Archives: Quotations

Things people said.

Not Everything Is a Sonnet, Damn It

Posted on March 20, 2022 by JMN

“I get pretty impatient with people who consider any fourteen-line poem to be a sonnet. The turns of thought are crucial, as is the number of turns.” (Carl Phillips, interviewed by David Baker, http://www.kenyonreview.org) The interview inspiring these illustrations is … Continue reading →

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Dogs or Cats?

Posted on February 10, 2022 by JMN

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? And what would you want to know?It seems to me that the author plays a kind of secondary role in this whole business of literature. Authors are … Continue reading →

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Rochelle Feinstein: ‘I Don’t Want to Make Work That’s Beautiful’

Posted on January 31, 2022 by JMN

By the time [Rochelle Feinstein] arrived at Pratt, she knew she wanted to make art — an awareness inspired in large part by reading Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1951 “Memoirs of Hadrian,” a fictionalized autobiography of the Roman emperor. “I realized that … Continue reading →

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Pronoun Rebellion (1)

Posted on January 22, 2022 by JMN

It’s apparent that contributors to Poetry magazine compose their own biographical snapshots, which allows for a gamut of voicings and modes of self-assertion. A grammar nerd notices how these established and establishing technicians of the word mold language to their … Continue reading →

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Art Tickle: Mixing Your Blacks

Posted on January 20, 2022 by JMN

Is there a better definition of art than the effort, the ache, to explain one’s inner experience and be understood?… I was starting out as a painter, and [Chuck Close] supported and encouraged me. He bought me my first proper … Continue reading →

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Wayne Thiebaud: ‘Deadpan Style of Figuration’

Posted on January 13, 2022 by JMN

Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) is said to have painted daily to the end. He described himself as driven by “this almost neurotic fixation of trying to learn to paint.” “It has never ceased to thrill and amaze me,” he said, “the … Continue reading →

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Rewarded With Provocations

Posted on January 8, 2022 by JMN

It helps me read contemporary poetry to conjure the mindset of an athlete in the elite sport of pole vaulting. The bar sits there at a distanced height. I summon latency, coil with icy focus, charge the standards, launch myself … Continue reading →

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‘Confound, Torment, Swallow Us Whole’

Posted on December 26, 2021 by JMN

To write, first and foremost, is to choose the words to tell a story, whereas to translate is to evaluate, acutely, each word an author chooses. Thus starts Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay drawn from the afterword of her translation of “Trust” … Continue reading →

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Kafka’s Drawing Isn’t Kafkaesque!

Posted on December 19, 2021 by JMN

A trove of drawings by Franz Kafka was brought to light in 2019. They share, says Philip Oltermann, features with paintings Kafka describes in his fiction: “… men riding flying buckets, singing mice and creatures made of household detritus… dream-like … Continue reading →

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Mean or Not, It’s a Feat

Posted on December 12, 2021 by JMN

Can a poem hurt the reader into glimpsing its cargo? The poem discussed is ‘From “Banana [ ],”’ Poetry, December 2021, by Paul Hlava Ceballos. I encounter poetry I perceive to be all kinds of icky: cryptic, elliptic, hierophantic, delphic, … Continue reading →

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