Contributor: Andrew David King

Sharing Strange Ghosts: Reflections on Jack Spicer at Berkeley

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It felt very fitting to launch Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared: The Collected Letters at Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2025) at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. The campus was a key location for the California poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) at the bookends of his poetic career. Spicer would designate his arrival at Berkeley in 1946 as the year of his birth. In the late 1940s, he organized the Writers Conference poetry workshops in Wheeler Hall, the first of the many alternative poetry spaces he curated on the margins and outskirts of academia. In 1965, Spicer lectured and read at the Berkeley […]

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Dreaming Metapluralism: Jonathon Keats’s “The Future Democracies Laboratory”

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As soon as it seemed on the night and early morning of November 5th and 6th that Donald J. Trump was on track to win the presidency, postmortems of the Democrats’ failure began to pop up like so many fungi. (Some were even written in advance of the election.) Varieties of optimism, from the cautious to the overconfident, disintegrated into hypotheticals and cases. Once the outcome was known—the recent past fixed—it became fair game for meddling. The dice had rolled to a stop; the gears of retroactive prophecy began to turn. The Future Democracies Laboratory, a project by artist and […]

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Q&A with Andrew Ridker: The Absurdity of the Facts of Things

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Posted on by Zack Ravas

It’s hard not to see Andrew Ridker’s acerbic, cerebral first novel, The Altruists (319 pages; Viking)—which has attracted attention from NPR and The Times, among others—as an answer to the question of how to think about, let alone write about, a major strain of American life in 2019. The plot centers around a family at once archetypal and painfully real: Arthur, a pedantic, regret-filled professor who finds tenure elusive; his psychotherapist wife, Francine, whose premature death from breast cancer was worsened by Arthur’s cheating on her in the terminal stages of her illness; their daughter, Maggie, a sanctimonious, kleptomaniac tutor; […]

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Donald Trump Reviews Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’

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Posted on by me

Stars: 10/10 Bergman. You know, people said he wasn’t as good as Dreyer. They said it. They said he couldn’t do it. He did it, though. He really went and did it. I mean, people are worried about death. Capital-D Death. They want answers, they’re dying, they’re not happy. So this guy, big handsome-looking Norwegian guy, European guy, you know, he plays chess with Death. Death doesn’t know what to do, he’s like, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” It’s true, folks. Never before—no one’s ever seen this before. They keep playing, they’re on a beach, it’s great. There’s […]

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The Work of Love Is Revenge: Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Lodger’

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Considering Alfred Hitchcock’s early movie The Lodger in light of his complete oeuvre—a task that can happen only anachronistically—gives us the old master minus two elements that furnished his films with the trappings of modernity amid an otherworldliness: color and sound. Where scores and palettes might have made reliable signposts, into this silent black-and-white film step in cinematography, action, tone, and shadow, drawing up a London that has more affinities with the cramped darkness of the theater than any brick-and-mortar city. Forced to eschew  [musical?] crescendos—then a fact of the format, but an active exclusion in later films like The […]

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America’s Westernmost Indie Bookstore: Talk Story on the Garden Isle

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Along Hanapepe Road in Hanapepe, Kaua’i—a town as wet as it is green—the storefronts this August morning are still shaded; it’s too early for anyone but tourists. Besides the rare interruption of a passing car, movement is confined to two locations: a cafe selling wraps named after punk bands (and also where someone has scrawled in Sharpie on a bathroom wall “LEVON RIP 4/19/12,” a reference to the late drummer of The Band) and the local bookstore. Talk Story, which derives its name from the Hawaiian slang for casual conversation, establishes its noteworthiness immediately: “THE WESTERN-MOST INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE OF THE […]

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Ghosts in the Archive: Five Notes on the Asian Art Museum’s ‘Phantoms’

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I. The first thing I see when I enter the Asian Art Museum on opening night of “Phantoms of Asia”—before the scrolls, the photographs, the paintings, and the artifacts—is a sculpture of an upside-down “A” crawling with graffiti. Who’s the artist? I ask a staff member. Everyone, I’m told. The freestanding letter serves as a meeting point for the museums’ thousands of guests, each of whom can add to the piece. Some sign their names, others draw hearts. Dates and initials on white. From a distance, nothing’s legible; all that comes through is the letter itself. BE A CITIZEN OF […]

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Deconstructing the Genius: ‘Picasso: Masterpieces …’ at the de Young Museum

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The Picasso of the contemporary American imagination and the Picasso of flesh and blood deserve adequate distinction. Because of his universally accepted greatness, it’s easily taken for granted that the same painter could produce both the glowing anthem-portraits of his Rose Period and jagged political commentary such as “Guernica.” It doesn’t help that Picasso’s reputation is so gargantuan as to be nearly self-propagating—nor that his name has not only earned a requisite mention in every elementary- and high school visual arts class, but become a descriptor, synonymous with excessive artistic ability. All of this results in a numbed appreciation for […]

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On the Subject of Truth (with a Captital T): Q&A with Troy Jollimore

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In ordinary conversation, the terms “poet” and “philosopher” tend to be applied arbitrarily to people with artistic and intellectual capabilities. But in the case of author and philosophy professor Troy Jollimore, they’re not hyperbolic descriptions but hard facts. Jollimore rose to literary prominence in 2006 when the National Book Critics Circle named his first book of poems, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, the recipient of one of its annual awards. Since then, his second poetry collection, At Lake Scugog, has appeared, and his poems have been published in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and other journals. Concerned with both the hypothetical and […]

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Approaching the Omega Point: Aron Meynell and Erik Otto at White Walls

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The work of San Francisco artist Aron Meynell doesn’t immediately command attention. His tones are muted—“somber” is how White Walls gallery owner and curator Justin Giarla put it—and his subject matter that which might be swiftly passed over in the work of a less-skilled artist: trees, animals, the occasional person. But to round down the quietude of these pieces to silence would be an underestimation of their power. Instead of choosing to shock or scream, the carefully constructed landscape studies comprising Meynell’s first solo show hum along almost inaudibly, their worlds not quite plausible but not easily rejected as fantasy. […]

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Between Possibilities: Stephen Dunn’s ‘Here and Now’

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Whenever a poet as preeminent as Stephen Dunn releases a new corpus of material, the potential for failure can’t help but manifest itself. Some might fear that the book, having come from an author who has already attained a pinnacle of critical achievement (Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for Different Hours), will turn out to be a footnote compared to the works that preceded it. Still others might stifle an otherwise solid book with narrow expectations or preconceptions. Yet Dunn’s most recent publication, Here and Now (Norton; 112 pages), is anything but stillborn, an object all its own—rather […]

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Poetry and Its Public: One Conversation Within A Long-Running Discussion

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The debate on poetry’s responsibility, or lack thereof, to an audience is undoubtedly as old as the art itself. Recent movements have taken noted stances on the “for” and “against” poles, from hermetic aesthetic-worship to cries for accessibility. Critic and author David Orr took up the debate via a review of several new books in Poetry’s April issue — and continued the discussion by responding to my Letter to the Editor in the June issue regarding his essay. Using releases by Thomas Sayers Ellis, Timothy Donnelly, C.D. Wright, and Eleanor Wilner as points of departure, Orr’s original piece, “Public poetry?”, […]

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