Part of the Editor's Choice series.
Paul Schmidt. Courtesy of the author.
Wonderful as it is to have two books by Paul Schmidt—poet, playwright, translator, actor, teacher—appearing at the same time, it is also a bit confusing. Night Life and Winter Solstice, both published by Painted Leaf Press, are such radically different volumes. The poems in Night Life have been gathered from years of writing: startling autobiography appears side by side with some brilliant and cheeky translations from Catullus; here is a lyric, there is a lesson; intimacies and cosmographies wind about one another. There are some extraordinary, valuable poems here, including “Night Watch,” “The Operation,” “Holy Picture,” and the sequence called “Austin City Limits.”
Winter Solstice is, by contrast, a series of prose poems from one intensive writing bout brought on, in the writer’s words, when, “after several all-night vigils with Robert Mapplethorpe, I was visited by beings in white masks.” It is a hallucinatory, raunchy, deeply disturbed, and disturbing midnight of the soul, a rant of the late 20th century that transports writer and reader alike into the prayerful attitude of a medieval saint in his cell.
—April Bernard
The writer on her new poetry collection, rearranging the nervous system, and a fact’s capacity to contain its own strangeness.
In a career spanning over two decades, Wayne Koestenbaum has copped to a lot.
A snow lark hovers over the isolated Isle of the Dead A shadow on the beach is an echo of Venus who bestows upon me some ripened red fruit In this isolated moment waves produce a dream that seduces me
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Jasper Johns, Tobias Wolff, Laurie Simmons, Sapphire, Scott Elliott, Brenda Blethyn, Craig Lucas, Suzannah Lessard & Honor Moore, Peter Dreher, and Richard Einhorn.
We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
