Victor Cova introduces a 1941 exchange between Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton.

Personally, I associate Satie’s work with a feeling of the aridity that Nietzsche came to value over Wagnerism — the gentle sea-breeze in the highest mountains that wafts in from some strange land and tickles the senses with possibilities of spiritual freedom.

As the artist, reaching deep into nothing, with nothing, and only for the sake of desire, creates something great, far beyond the imagined object of desire, fulfilling and exceeding every wish in a way which could never have been fully anticipated, so too does the lover encounter the beloved.

He was not a literary artist in the sense that his work doesn’t seem to wrestle with questions of form; he’s not attempting to reinvent the surrealist modes at his disposal but rather making use of them as vehicles for his insurgent imagination and apocalyptic vision, the fury of which elevates his writing above and beyond the mere assemblage of irrational word combinations.

When I looked up Barrax’s collections, I found that his work spans not only relatively traditional-looking lyrics, but formally experimental poems that disarrange syntax and disperse words across the page.

After a century of deafness to the task and ambition of music, composers may need to relearn how to learn before Schumann’s words can even begin to make sense. How can the music of the past free the music of the present?

Jack’s poetry asks you, the reader, to abandon yourself, to engage with what you don’t know, and can’t understand, and enter a path of transformative gnosis.

Helen Adam is a singular luminary whose ballads, if you read them out loud and late at night, will sneak into your mind and create phantasmagorias of exquisite, sensual, brooding, and melancholy fairy-tales.

Brian Lucas writes about the life and career of Laurence Weisberg.

Grey Space poems are like placards, billboards, vertiginous verbal icons; they are often verse vendettas, self-mythologizing though not self-aggrandizing documents, punk percussion protests, dirty ditties, saucy stanzas, and crazy collages that are collisions of sound, sense, and structure.

Trakl is a main character in Adorno’s important concept of the enigmatical. 

Hilda Morley’s life and career read like a course in 20th century modernism.

“I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual.”

Una entrevista con César Vallejo, perdida desde julio de 1937, publicada con notas de Andrés Ajens.

What dynamically distinguishes Dumas is the visionary element, where the everyday is upended by mythic moments and alternative possibilities of living and dreaming are represented.

Mailer’s essay burns as a piece of literary criticism that clarifies the philosophical, aesthetic, and political motives of modern authors like Miller, who have gone the way of the dinosaur.

The hellmouth no longer speaks but softly sings a nonsense verse as we suckle at its infernal teat in forgetful slumber.

We can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. Even in times of “peace” the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.

Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually are.

“Timelessness” must be unmasked as an exponent of the bourgeois concept of truth.