On Reading Adorno : Any book, just by materially existing as a recognizable image of a book in the current disastrous political climate, is already, before having been opened, let alone read, an emblem of melancholy, Adorno suggests.

A City

Novelness: A Conversation with Kate Briggs (summer 2023; published by Granta)

NOVELNESS Kate Briggs: Lisa, we first met almost a decade ago, teaching writing together at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. We used to meet first thing at Gare du Nord to get on the 6 a.m.-ish train from Paris to Rotterdam. At that time I was working

Notes, Murmurations: On Notebooks, Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn, Composition across Time (a lecture given in October 2024 at Vancouver Island University)

What I wanted when I began to write is what I still want: a freedom-sensation that could return. I thought poetry could be that thing. With my companions, we called it “that thing”, not daring to define or limit its recognition. It’s less the nominative than the returning part

On Insomnia

Begin with insomnia. On the night of July 7 or rather in the early morning of the 8th, insomnia intrudes thoroughly and suddenly after decades of voluptuous, nourishing sleep with its accompanying dreams. My two great sustaining talents exit, and like a wilful, opaque animal insomnia takes their place. I