Issue 98 | July 2010
Do we do art, make poems, to try to escape our nightmares? Or to try to remember them? Or to conquer the dreaming bodies, the waking bodies, of other people, to have that vampiric power, like John Henry Fuseli’s nightmare creature perched on the torso of a pale, sleeping maiden? Or to harm people?
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"A lot of people who come of age and go to college and suddenly discover there’s this whole world of ideas, many of them quite radical, that they just never knew existed before. So they wind up torn between the ideas themselves -- about class interests and conflict -- and they’re coming at it from this really academic way where it’s the privilege and access of the academy that allowed them to have access to those ideas in the first place."
by
Mark Doten
To be transported to a newly invented world is to discover a fresh ecology of human relationships, and it’s one big reason we read. But it’s an intense pleasure too to fall into the pillow of a known and loved world.
by
Barbara J. King
“My job as a teacher is to try to create readers, especially poetry readers. Poetry (on the page at least) is a foreign language to most young people. Of course, there are always a few who get interested. When they say they’re changing their major from Bioengineering to Writing, as one did the other day, I think, ‘My God, what have I done?’ Sometimes I wish I had a job where I could be quiet, maybe as a jeweler cutting stones. But if poets don’t pass on the enthusiasm for poetry, who will? There aren’t many scholars doing that these days.”
by
Paul Holler
"I do play a lot with metaphors throughout book. I play with the question of fiction. Here’s a work in which I study activists who lived during that period, but I myself didn’t ‘live San Francisco’ like these characters. Who can say what is fact, what is fiction? Some told me versions that were exaggerations, but they were great stories. Some left large gaps, so I had to imagine what happened. It’s a big fake book, but fiction can be more truthful in many ways."
by
Terry Hong
"I’ve thought hard about what it means to be an individual but to also exist socially, how we try to be true to ourselves and yet also live with others, which requires subterfuge, white lies, conformity. Individualism taken too far means lonely. Community taken too far means self-effacement. Finding the middle ground is the most all-consuming 'work' we do in our lives."
by
Micah McCrary
"The appeal of astrology or discussions of faith and destiny is that it gives people comfort. It’s like reading the last page of a book, to know where you’re going. It does relieve you from some of the burden of choice -- destiny makes you adjust and deal with what is. So if you think of marriage in terms of destiny, most of your choices are around adjusting to your destiny, as opposed to saying 'this is what I really want.' And I think there is some real beauty in that."
by
Niranjana Iyer
