The Gutter and the Spire: The Exilic Revelation of Thomas McGrath It is one of culture’s buried ironies that the poets who burn with the clearest flame are often those whose names rarely appear in the currency of citation. Such is the case of Thomas McGrath (1916–1990), a North Dakota-born American poet whose corpus, dense…
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.
Invisible Comets: The Lyrical Cosmology of Ronald Johnson
Invisible Comets: The Lyrical Cosmology of Ronald Johnson The poet Ronald Johnson (1935–1998) was born in Ashland, Kansas, into the wide horizons of the American Midwest, amid the salt flats, shortgrass prairie, and the piercing solitude of the plains. This geographical remoteness furnished him with an imagination that perceived language as a contacting device, a…
The Gnostic Murmur of Gustaf Sobin: Language as Elegy and Excavation
The Gnostic Murmur of Gustaf Sobin: Language as Elegy and Excavation Gustaf Sobin, born in 1935 in Boston, Massachusetts, and deceased in 2005 in Goult, Provence, remains a singular and haunting figure in late 20th-century American poetry, albeit largely unheralded in mainstream literary constellations. Educated at Brown University before relocating permanently to France in 1962,…
The Starless Cartographer: A Journey Through the Works of Gustaf Sobin
The Starless Cartographer: A Journey Through the Works of Gustaf Sobin Gustaf Sobin (1935–2005), an American poet and essayist most at home among the silences of Provence, remains a figure both obscured and clarified by the peculiar clarity of his linguistic architecture. A protégé of René Char and a long-time expatriate, Sobin’s poetic project was…
The Unseen Cartographies of Ronald Johnson
The Unseen Cartographies of Ronald Johnson Born in Ashland, Kansas in 1935, Ronald Johnson’s early life was shaped by the great flatness of the American heartland, a geography mirrored in the vast textual plains of his later poetry. Often recognized only within the obscure echelons of “poets’ poets,” Johnson’s oeuvre remains largely beyond the radar…
The Candle and the Spiral: Reflections on Mortimer Brewster’s Hauntology of Language
The Candle and the Spiral: Reflections on Mortimer Brewster’s Hauntology of Language The name Mortimer Brewster seldom tugs at the lapels of mainstream literary discourse. His slender oeuvre, published almost entirely in self-financed pamphlets between 1927 and 1933, slumbers in the footnotes of obscure bibliographies and the minds of those few initiates who stumbled upon…
The Nocturne Cities of César Moro: A Study in Oneiric Exile
The Nocturne Cities of César Moro: A Study in Oneiric Exile Those who walk beside the margins of the canon often walk longer, stranger roads. One such traveller was Alfredo Quíspez-Asín, better known by his pseudonym César Moro (1903–1956), a Peruvian poet and painter who died mostly forgotten in Lima, some years after ceasing to…
The Hopeless Geometry of Giorgio de Chirico’s Brother: Alberto Savinio’s Literary Fugue
The Hopeless Geometry of Giorgio de Chirico’s Brother: Alberto Savinio’s Literary Fugue Giovanni Papini once declared, “he who creates another reality is no longer a chronicler of this world, but the architect of his own cosmos.” Few writers illustrate this adage more seamlessly than Alberto Savinio (1891–1952), the polymathic sibling of the better-known surrealist painter…
The Solitude of Silence: The Gnostic Fugue of Gustaf Sobin
The Solitude of Silence: The Gnostic Fugue of Gustaf Sobin Gustaf Sobin, a marginal wizard in a mainstreamed age, was born in 1935 in Boston, Massachusetts, and passed from this world in 2005—but his true life unfolded far from his American beginnings. A student at Brown University before expatriating permanently to France in 1962, Sobin…
Through the Amber: The Obscure Philosophy of Francis Vielé-Griffin
Through the Amber: The Obscure Philosophy of Francis Vielé-Griffin Among the underlit oases of Symbolist literature dwells Francis Vielé-Griffin, a queasily hyphenated name that echoes in the chambers of forgotten experimentation. Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1864, Vielé-Griffin was a Franco-American poet who disavowed the conventions of rhyme in French verse with a furious calm….
József Erdélyi and the Poem as Paradox: A Journey through the Slopes of Obscurity
József Erdélyi and the Poem as Paradox: A Journey through the Slopes of Obscurity József Erdélyi (1896–1978) remains a deeply enigmatic figure on the periphery of Hungarian poetic heritage—an ethnographer, translator, and lyrical visionary who, despite the breadth of his intellect and the quiet severity of his linguistic craft, is seldom discussed outside circles of…
Descending into the Light: The Reclusive Vision of Ivan Il’in-Petrosky
Descending into the Light: The Reclusive Vision of Ivan Il’in-Petrosky Born into the grim heat of a sclerotic empire, Ivan Il’in-Petrosky (1893–1947) remains a cipher etched in the marginalia of Russian poetic history. A contemporary of the Russian Symbolists and an occasional correspondent of Andrei Bely, Il’in-Petrosky eschewed the salons of Moscow and Petersburg, choosing…