How do you write? My best friend might look at her old poems and draw from those. My former newspaper advisor tweeted at me: “Nulla dies sine linea,” or “Never a day without a line.”
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The Work of Inspiration: Five Pieces about Poetry
The best artists of any kind–poet, painter, performer–will inspire awe, not envy. They will make you want to make things of your own. When I’m feeling stuck, I’ll read about poets who inspire me/who are new to me, and today, I’ll share a few with you.
The Work of Inspiration: Five Pieces about Poetry
How do you write? My best friend might look at her old poems and draw from those. My former newspaper advisor tweeted at me: “Nulla dies sine linea,” or “Never a day without a line.”
The Wandering Years
Thoughts, observations, and reflections from the travel journals of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Who Was the Poet Frank Stanford?
With the recently released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, the work of a brilliant, difficult, much-mythologized and little-known American poet is finally widely available. Frank Stanford’s short life was a study in contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a […]
Is W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ the Most Pillaged Piece of Literature in the English Language?
[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]
Teachings
On poetry and dying: Win Bassett reflects on a summer spent working as a hospital chaplain.
Mark Haddon: ‘Ultimately, There Is No Narrative Without Death’
An conversation with the author about his dark new short story collection, The Pier Falls.
Syracuse Transcript
THE MAN IN THE SHELL (OR CASE, DEPENDING ON WHICH TRANSLATION YOU READ, BUT IT IS KIND OF INTERESTING HOW “SHELL” AND “CASE” MEAN ROUGHLY THE SAME THING IN RUSSIAN, APPARENTLY) So here are three frame stories, linked by various recurring characters. The first one opens with two men, one inside the barn, one outside; […]
Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year
All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

