On the heels of all this talk of colons, Emdashes solicits open letters to punctuation marks.
Dear Colon
“His parents were like, ‘Robert!’ / His friends were like, ‘Bob?'”
Kick off your Monday morning with this Aaron Belz poem honoring Evel Knievel, you daredevil, you.
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In Search of Lost Self
“I feel nothing. I think: What an ugly place for it to happen. I call it The Accident. I didn’t hear, or see, or feel any of it, or if I did, I stored it somewhere irretrievable even to me.” Gloria Harrison‘s essay “Where the Highway Splits” stuns over at The Rumpus.
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Whitman on Poe
“Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.” – Walt Whitman on Edgar Allan Poe’s significance, circa 1880.
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Post-Maidan
Recommended Reading: Marci Shore on reading Tony Judt’s Postwar in modern Ukraine.
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A Nation of Poets
“Mr. Walt Whitman has imagined that a certain amount of violent sympathy with the great deeds and sufferings of our soldiers, and of admiration for our national energy, together with a ready command of picturesque language, are sufficient inspiration for a poet. If this were the case, we had been a nation of poets.” A young Henry James reviews Whitman’s Drum Taps.