Two new poems by Joel Newberger, read at the Caesura issue 1 event.

JC Holburn reviews Paul Schrader’s film The Card Counter

If society no longer reliably yields a consistent aesthetic framework, and if even the immediate sensations of our own minds can no longer be trusted, how can we hope to reach the inner truth of an artwork?

Then, early one morning, as the night was thinning out; as — like a ball of alms rice whitened with yogurt in the hand of the mendicant called Time; like a lump of foam on the dark river of the night sky; like a fragment of the celestial nymph Menakā’s white crystal nail file; dappled as beautifully as a honeycomb

By the light of Psalm 151, we ask, what poet, writing now, is so ready for catastrophe as Rachel Blau DuPlessis? What living poet can so masterfully take up the Lurianic myth of the Breaking of the Vessels, do justice to its imaginative drama, fathom its complexities with an acute historical and critical awareness, yet sing this tale in a way that is both true to our secular moment, and true to the spiritual agonies at the heart of any such shattering as the tale tells.

Don’t lose sight of the mountain!

Maybe now finally ink begins to flow into the nib of this Platignum calligraphy fountain pen I have not used probably since 1985. Yes maybe now finally. Maybe now. Maybe finally.

“Art has to have a sense of pleasure and danger, of stretching limitations and perceptions.”

For moderns, art is the appearance of suffering from the unrealized potential of freedom, i.e., the appearance of freedom’s task.

“The category of experience connects original composition to translation. Just as poets shape their experience into a poem, the translator shapes a more specific experience, the experience of the original poem, into the translation.”

maybe, as the world collapses around us, we are haunted by an unconscious sense that maybe we have too much, maybe we are taking up too much space, maybe we are mostly takers and the only thing we really contribute is an endless stream of microplastics into our waterways.

The sacrifices made by the costumed vigilante are many, not the least of which is his perpetual loneliness. Does it have to be that way? Judge for yourself, dear reader!

The view of art underlying the essay, and the type of film that remains my principal, though not only, model for greatness in cinema, have themselves been bypassed by much that has happened since, in particular the emphasis on the politics of an artwork, and on various aspects of the artist's identity rather than complexity of internal form.

Excerpt from Jean Paul Richter’s 1797 novel Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces introduced by Brandon Bien.

It took the formula of one species of conceptualism to capture the swan song of another.

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.

I am stupid, I am ungifted, I am awkward, but I pray to you, tall spruces. I am quite awkward, I am… a coward. Yesterday, I was frightened of a man I don't respect. It's because of my cowardice that I can't learn to ride a bicycle. I haven't enough will power for anything, but I pray to you, tall spruces.

The most complex thing in existence seems to be the human mind. How much of existence, however, has the mind itself as its origin?

The nursery rhymes that shaped us as children have stood the test of time for a reason. Are those sing-song tales realistic? Ruby will be the judge of that!

They’re explicit pictures, and in a world so entirely scrubbed clean of transgression, any sense of naughtiness is its own form of pleasure. Dainty feet and hands poke out in flirty little kicks, one appendage in front of the trompe l'œil frame, the other receding behind. The effect is not unlike a peep show.