Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach: The Mystic Aesthetic of Living Light In the recesses of turn-of-the-century symbolism, amidst an orchard of louder voices and more publishable minds, we find the life and faintly glowing oeuvre of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach—painter, prophet, poet. Though primarily remembered for his allegorical paintings suffused with proto-New Age mysticism, Diefenbach (1851–1913) also inhabited…
Category: Writers and Poets
This is the smoking lounge of the blog—the velvet-curtained space where writers and poets, both spectral and flesh-bound, gather to whisper, declaim, and occasionally howl. Here you’ll find sharp quills, ink-stained confessions, literary provocations, and verses that may or may not be approved by any known academy.
From masterful miniatures to derailed epics, this category celebrates the written word in all its unruly glory. Expect brilliance, bewilderment, and the occasional typewriter jam left in for effect.
Welcome to Writers and Poets—a curated chaos of language for those who still believe in its spell.
Dream Anatomies: The Obscured Labyrinth of Peter Redgrove
Dream Anatomies: The Obscured Labyrinth of Peter Redgrove Among the whispering corridors of 20th-century British verse, the name Peter Redgrove resounds faintly like footsteps echoing in a fenside chapel—distant, tremorous, oddly amphibious. To call Redgrove obscure might be misleading; he was decorated with numerous honors, including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1996. Yet…
Between Silence and Lanterns: The Peripheral Light of Gustaf Sobin
Between Silence and Lanterns: The Peripheral Light of Gustaf Sobin Among the many demiurges of modern poetry whose names resound only in whispered corridors, Gustaf Sobin remains a curiously effulgent shadow—an American-born poet who spent the larger part of his life among the ruins, vines, and vanished dialects of Provence. Born in 1935 in New…
The Embroiderer of Incompleted Maps: The Oblique Cosmos of Gustaf Sobin
The Embroiderer of Incompleted Maps: The Oblique Cosmos of Gustaf Sobin Born in 1935 in the American southwest and having spent the majority of his adult life abroad in France, Gustaf Sobin remains one of the more esoteric yet resonant voices in late 20th-century poetry. Inhabiting a terrain midway between mystic architecture and the lexicon…
The Fog-Lit Edge: The Life and Symbolics of Lionel Ziprin
The Fog-Lit Edge: The Life and Symbolics of Lionel Ziprin Lionel Ziprin (1924–2009) remains an enigmatic figure in American poetry—a shadowy presence in the post-Beat constellation who sublimated public recognition for a deeply personal mysticism. Born into a Lower East Side Jewish family in New York City, Ziprin drew from the deep well of his…
Dead Leaves in Rain: The Uncanny Testimonies of Jean Paulhan
Dead Leaves in Rain: The Uncanny Testimonies of Jean Paulhan Jean Paulhan, born in 1884 in Nîmes, France, cultivated a literary life that remains curiously marginal in the English-speaking world, though central to the French avant-garde and the philosophical exegesis of language and power. A literary critic, editor, resistance fighter, and quiet kingmaker of letters,…
Alexei Parshchik: The Burning, Silent Cartographer of Time
Alexei Parshchik: The Burning, Silent Cartographer of Time Born on an overcast October morning in the Volga basin in 1932, Alexei Parshchik entered a world already trembling on the cusp of steel. The son of an arithmetician and a librarian—a dual heritage of precision and lyricism—Parshchik’s early years were marked by a spiritual hunger that…
Harold Norse and the Alchemy of Outsiderhood
Harold Norse and the Alchemy of Outsiderhood Born in Brooklyn in 1916, Harold Norse emerged as one of the truly unclassifiable voices of 20th-century American poetry. Though often associated with the Beat movement and the post-war poetic avant-garde, Norse defied alignment with any particular canon or clique. His work fuses surrealism, Whitmanesque eroticism, proletarian directness,…
Exhaustion as Illumination: The Inner Labyrinths of Gustaf Sobin
Exhaustion as Illumination: The Inner Labyrinths of Gustaf Sobin In the parched corridors of late-20th-century experimental poetics, Gustaf Sobin (1935–2005) moves like a phosphorescent shadow — delicate, vital, and ultimately elusive. Born in Boston and educated at Brown University, Sobin took an early leave from his American origins and expatriated himself to the village of…
Reveries of Dusk: The Forgotten Cosmology of Lionel Ziprin
Reveries of Dusk: The Forgotten Cosmology of Lionel Ziprin In the cavernous footnotes of American poetry, Lionel Ziprin (1924–2009) haunts with the density of a Kabbalist cipher — not easily parsed, never fully illuminated, yet indelibly engraved into certain hidden wood panels of the 20th century avant-garde. A Lower East Side mystic, Ziprin was a…
Reveries of Obscurity: Delving into the Alephs of René Daumal
Reveries of Obscurity: Delving into the Alephs of René Daumal René Daumal is one of those phantasmagoric figures in literature whose very obscurity weaves a kind of mystique around his life and work. A French surrealist, mountaineer, mystic, satirist, and seeker of arcane truths, Daumal lived a brief life (1908–1944) that unfolded less like a…
Unfastening the Logos: The Fugitive World of Gustaf Sobin
Unfastening the Logos: The Fugitive World of Gustaf Sobin In the fractured light of twentieth-century poetic innovation, Gustaf Sobin (1935–2005) occupies a liminal, glowing station—a voice born in a Bostonian cradle but alchemized in the Provençal hinterlands, where the stone of language was rubbed so clean by the sun it burned with lucent silence. A…