It is widely acknowledged that Shakespeare lacked a university education — there is no record of it — unlike his contemporaries or near-contempories, such as Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Nashe, Beaumont, Fletcher, so forth. Despite that, he was a greater writer than any of them, and pilfering was part of his toolkit. As Anthony Burgess notes in his biography of Shakespeare, he not only took plots and stories for his plays — this too is widely acknowledged — but also “filched” entire passages (plagiarized them, if you will) and in the process improved them immeasurably.
A True Poet’s ‘Great Balls of Doubt’
The world Mark Terrill sees is “essentially forlorn, if not absurd, if not entirely hopeless. But his poetry is far from hopeless.” — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Walter Isaacson on the Craft of Biography
‘My road to biography began at TIME magazine.’
He titled his lecture ‘Lessons About Living with Geniuses.’ His latest biography is about Elon Musk. His previous biographies were about Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Jennifer Doudna.
Wislawa Szymborska: ‘Negative’
‘You look like a ghost / who’s trying to summon up the living. / (And since I still number among them, / I should appear to him and tap: / good night, that is, good morning, / farewell, that is, hello…)”
Read an Excerpt
Claude Pélieu’s Kali Yug Express via Mary Beach
“A visionary prophetic book written when the Hippies and Yippies were dissolving the Sixties, which didn’t give us the political and social change needed . . . Pélieu saw Céline’s words become the reality: ‘The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy’.”— Charles Plymell
Patagonia as Metaphor: Expressing the Off-Beat
Presiding writers, for their part, bequeath journeys.
Homer to Ithaca. Basho to Deep North Honshu.
Coleridge to Xanadu. Yeats to Byzantium.
Journeys full of imagining.
Five Brief Stanzas from a Scottish-born Poet
![Drawing by Malcolm Ritchie [2018]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Drawing-by-Malcolm-Ritchie-2018border-360x528enh-200x200.jpg)
as a brief visitor to my ear
a fly droned on about
some matter or other that
was too brief for me to catch
On Yom Kippur My Atonement Is Weak
Cold Turkey Press published this card four years ago in a limited edition. It applies now more than ever.
Cut-Up Experiment Published by Moloko in New Edition
“Cut Up or Shut Up” was an experiment that grew out of Carl Weissner’s “The Braille Film” and a cut-up text by the two of us, “The Louis Project,” both published by the Nova Broadcast Press in 1970. To put the stamp of approval on our effort, so to speak, we asked William Burroughs for a text to use perhaps as a foreword. As far as I know, Burroughs never did say whether he approved. But we took his contribution for an implicit endorsement.
‘the kind of thing to stir / belief in mythic gods’
In the pissing rain last night
a skywide lightning show
flashed for half an hour.
The blackness of the night
turned white, a most amazing
strobing whiteness everywhere . . .
‘The Undying Guest’
Roving Poet With a Painter’s Eye
Mark Terrill’s latest book fits gemlike and exquisite in the palm of your hand. Yet it spreads like a flower deep in your head. Probing daily life for meaning in far-flung places, this sea-going, globe-trotting author is a roving poet with a painter’s eye. If it’s possible to be Kerouacian without the mawkishness and Baudelaireian without the derision, Terrill is both.
‘Broken, Furious, and Infinitely Pathetic’
Mencken Could Have Written Trump’s Obituary
Now that former President Donald J. Trump has been indicted for directing a conspiracy to in effect abolish America’s democratic system by corrupting the electoral process so as to cling to power instead of complying with the peaceful transfer of power as required by the Constitution, the S/U staff thought it appropriate to bring back this post from Nov. 9, 2020, with an up-to-date 2023 illustration.
A Slim Volume That ‘Unbends the Mind’
I’m told that a review of “Kleine Tiere / Small Animals” will appear in the Swiss literary journal ORTE. The book has been published in a bilingual (German-English) edition by Stadtlichter Presse. The review is by Clemens Umbricht.
Blogs Are Personal
A Mary Beach Letter Turns Up from Long Ago
This letter to Laura Huxley appeared on eBay. Where did it come from? Possibly from a dealer via the Huxley Estate.
A Different Kind of Mushroom Cloud
Recalling the first Trinity nuclear blast, which is being memorialized by the new Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer,” I couldn’t help thinking of the last collage that Norman O. Mustill made and his first using digital tools.
A Proper Obituary for Jay Jeff Jones (1946-2023)
Jay Jeff Jones was born in in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1946. His parents, Nelson and Lila Fay Jones, both hailed from Cherokee ancestry. Raised in and around San Francisco, Jay joined the Hell’s Angels in the early 1960, riding his Harley Davidson around the city. As a teenager, he hung around North Beach, acting with the Mime Troupe, later working as a copy boy for the San Francisco Examiner. Frank Herbert, author of “Dune,” was one of his bosses.
See the Difference
Shakespeare Rewrote This Sonnet
Which do you prefer? The earlier or the later version?