Advice for Writers

How to Be an American Writer

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Remembering Ted Berrigan

When I was a young poet living in the East Village in New York City in 1976, I took a writing workshop with Ted Berrigan. Ted taught at the legendary Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, then the center of the New York School of poets. His class was extremely popular. There were 35 to 40 students in the workshop. Ted held forth on various subjects during the class—he was a great raconteur, spinning amazing stories about the writers and artists he’d known over the years.

Poet Ted Berrigan

Ted said many memorable things about poetry to the students. I vividly recall him telling us, “If you really want to know how good a writer you are, all you have to do is look in the mirror.” That seemed like an extremely odd thing to say for several reasons. Not the least of those was that Ted himself was not the most personable human being. He grew long his dark scraggly hair and beard, was overweight, wore his sleeves sloppily rolled-up, and had thick glasses. And yet … he had a distinct appearance unlike anyone else I’ve ever known.

The following year, 1977, I was part of a group of three younger writers who interviewed Ted Berrigan for City magazine. Ted invited us to speak with him in the railroad flat in the tenement where he lived at 101 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. When the three of us conducting the interview arrived, Ted was there with his wife, the poet Alice Notley, and their two children. Toys littered the floor and the paint was peeling off the walls. But the apartment was decorated with stunning artworks by painters Ted was friends with, including Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, and Larry Rivers. Such a contrast!

portrait of Ted Berrigan by Alex Katz

Ted wrote in his poetry about using the drug methedrine, so I should not have been surprised that all we had to do for the interview was turn on the tape recorder, ask a short question, and Ted would talk nonstop for 15 minutes at a time.

He said some unforgettable things in that interview, including his analysis of speed in poetry. Ted categorized poets by whether they were “fast” or “slow” poets. In the “fast” group he included writers like Frank O’Hara. O’Hara was known for quickly jotting down stream-of-consciousness observations and thoughts during busy social interactions, so his poems have a rapid pace built into them. Among the “slow” poets, Ted listed Robert Creeley, a writer who often included short lines and a lot of blank space in his work.

Another memorable moment in the interview was when we asked Ted about his connection to the New York School. He revealed that the label “the New York School” was originally a joke, a goof on the School of Paris. Ted described the New York School in poetry as having no program or spokespersons, unlike, say, the Black Mountain School, where the writer Charles Olson deliberately shaped the aesthetic.

Ted also talked in the interview about the literary criticism then popular in university English departments, with its approach that “any poem could be ‘cracked.’” That was a description Ted quoted from his wife, Alice Notley. Ted went on to categorize that academic idea of a poem as, “If you went at it [a poem] hard enough you could literally take it apart and get it.” He dismissed that methodology as being just “funny,” a scornful attitude very typical of the avant-garde writers in New York City at the time.

City magazine editor Ron Kostar then questioned Ted Berrigan about the structure of his own poems. Ron challenged Ted by saying his poems were made up of fragments. Ted responded by saying that he and the writers he felt closest to got the idea of poems as collages of fragments from writers like Charles Olson and Ezra Pound. He maintained that what he and his literary colleagues were doing with fragments was not that different from the work of more traditional or narrative writers:

… we don’t think of it as fragmented, though it’s certainly made up of fragments … But in the piecing together there’s a definite line that runs through the poem, the same as the kind of line that runs through the most academic of academic poems. It’s just that it’s placed in a different location. It doesn’t run right down the center, but it moves in arabesques…

I love his description of the thread of a poem as moving in an arabesque, but I’m not sure I agree that all avant-garde poems have a thread running through them. Some are just random fragments.

Ted went on to offer a fascinating account of how he personally composed a poem:

… if the kind of poem I’m writing is a poem about an experience [or] … emotion that falls upon me, and I understand something all at once, I like the poem to give that to you. If it’s something that took longer, and was a more complex experience, I like the poem to give you enough to take you into that …

Another moment that stands out in the interview was when Ted said, “There are only half a dozen ways to begin a poem, and half a dozen ways to end a poem. Most poems take place in the middle …” I agree, and I’d even say that there are fewer than half a dozen ways to end a poem. (Please see my blogs on types of closure in poetry.)

I won’t easily forget Ted’s hilarious description of how he completely made up an interview with the composer John Cage. Ted published the interview, thinking that readers would understand that this was a work of fiction. It turned out this was not understood, and astonishingly, Ted’s piece won a prize as the best interview of the year. The judges, who included Susan Sontag and Robert Brustein, were very surprised to learn that Ted had created this made-up interview as a sort of Dadaist act. John Cage, it turned out, was highly amused by the whole incident.

Ted Berrigan died in 1983 at the age of 48, after a life of burning his candle at both ends. Many former students gratefully remember his classes, his humor, and his one-of-a-kind insightful ramblings on the art of poetry.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Be an American Writer

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Giulio Mozzi on “Why You Have to Love Some Writers and Hate Others”

This post is a guest blog by the celebrated Italian writer Giulio Mozzi. For a full bio of Giulio, please see below.

Whenever a writer is interviewed, it’s almost a given that they’ll be asked questions like:

“What books or writers have shaped you?”

“Who are your favorite writers?”

“What books are always on your bedside table?”

Giulio Mozzi

The writer’s answer is usually a sort of declaration of love for a certain book, or a certain writer. Of course, the answer is also a way of positioning oneself in an imaginary literary landscape. If you say you were shaped by Joyce/Musil/Proust, that’s not the same as saying you were shaped by Stevenson/Poe/Lovecraft. Tracing your influences to Perec/Queneau/Robbe-Grillet isn’t the same as saying your literary lineage goes through Tolkien/Herbert/Le Guin, etc. That assumes that these trios—I don’t know why, but they often come in trios—have meaning and an internal consistency. In some circles, James Joyce is the coolest, but he’s mocked by other groups. Another example: Stephen King is the Great Master in some circles, and simply ignored by others.

But I’d like to ask the opposite question: “What or who are the books or writers you just can’t stand, the ones that make you think, ‘I’d like to write a bit like everyone, but definitely not like them’”?

The history of literature, especially the history of modern literature, can be seen as the story of every generation's revolt against the previous one. The revolt of the naturalists against the sentimentality of the romantics, the revolt of the symbolists against the naturalists, the revolt of the futurists against everyone, the revolt of the new narrative writers against the rebellions of the neo-avant-gardists, the revolt of the postmodernists against the new narrative writers, etc. Generations follow one another; sons kill their fathers; daughters search for their mothers: it’s a continuous progression.

So: I believe that in the formative history of every writer, it’s important not just to love certain works but to hate others.

In the years when writing first hovered around me or within me (your choice!), and I hadn’t yet written much but was about to, my love for Marco Lodoli’s short story collection Grande Raccordo or—and to a lesser, though decisive extent—Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Separate Rooms—were both undoubtedly important for me. But equally important was my hatred, my truly furious hatred, for Andrea De Carlo’s Techniques of Seduction.

It's easy to dislike writers whose books are just bad, sloppy, or commercial. By commercial, I don’t mean mere entertainment—that’s something different. It’s all too easy to tear apart the writing of a romance novelist like Rosamunde Pilcher, for example. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the hatred that can arise toward a true writer, whose seriousness, artistic quality, technical ability, and historical importance can’t be denied; but is someone whose work is not only unbearable to you—they serve almost as a reverse fetish.

I’ve always wondered why I can't stand male English novelists (I mean English-English: Irish and Scottish are another matter entirely). Of course, there are exceptions (Henry Fielding! Charles Dickens!), but in general, when I try to read those writers, after a while I say to myself: “I just can’t do this.” Among contemporary writers, for example, I read Ian McEwan (who, despite his last name, isn’t Scottish) and I say to myself, “He’s so good! And such a pain in the ass!” Not to mention the Victorian writers en masse (and the related films by James Ivory). On the other hand, Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, etc.—I like them all.

Among the obligatory granddaddies of today’s Italian writers, I see Alberto Moravia and Italo Calvino mentioned over and over. It gets on my nerves that those two are talked about so often. I no longer know what to do with Calvino: it seems downright scandalous to me that a writer with such a modest, narrow, and stunted idea of literature was such a powerful editor. His American Lectures is an amazingly unimportant book. As for the Moravia, I appreciate his revolt against D’Annunzio-ism (even though I love Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetry). But I confess that Moravia’s most celebrated novels (especially The Conformist) have always seemed obtusely ideological to me and nothing more. The Moravia who forgets he’s Moravia, on the other hand, as in Roman Tales, is very, very beautiful.

Please note: these are not critical judgments. They’re my reactions in a particular mood, my character traits. I don’t claim any validity for them. I would never argue that Calvino and Moravia should be removed from anthologies. Just the opposite! But maybe for the anthologies, I wouldn’t choose the usual pieces.

I believe that when you start to become what you are, you also become that through opposition. Through what you reject. Through hatred, even.

I’m a little frightened, for example, by certain students of mine, who seem to universally love all great literature. “Is that even possible?” I’d like to ask them. “Is it possible that between the classic Italian epic poets Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, you like them both exactly the same? Is it possible that you love Leopardi as much as Manzoni?” I can’t. Tasso is beautiful, but I love Ariosto. Leopardi wrote a few sublime poems, but I love Manzoni. Reading Morante’s Lies and Sorcery or her Arturo’s Island is a wonderful adventure, but I love Balestrini’s Tristano!

So, ask yourself: if you write, when you write, against whom or what do you write? What or who do you want to be absolutely different from?

Giulio Mozzi has published more than 25 books—as editor, fiction writer, and poet—with leading Italian presses such as Einaudi, and Mondadori. His first short story collection, This Is the Garden, won the Premio Mondello. One of his stories appears in Mondadori’s anthology of the best Italian stories of the twentieth century. Giulio Mozzi has taught at several universities, and in 2011 he founded his own school for writers, la Bottega di narrazione (The Story Store).

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Be an American Writer

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Saturday, November 29, 2025

Emmanuelle Malhappe on Masculine and Feminine in The Odyssey

This guest blog is by Emmanuelle Malhappe, French poet, short story author, playwright, and psychoanalyst. For a longer bio, please see below.

Emmanuelle Malhappe

Masculine and Feminine in The Odyssey

Penelope is not Ulysses' wife. She is not waiting for her husband to come back, whatever we may think about faithfulness.

Because Penelope is not a woman. She is not even an archetype. She is a character.

A character Homer invented who embodies an idea. In my view, Penelope is the feminine in every human being.

In a certain sense, Homer wrote his own version of Genesis. In the Bible, Eve is created from Adam. Not from one of his ribs, as in the mistranslations of some hermeneutical traditions, but from one of his sides. Adam could not remain alone. Not because he was bored, which would make his woman just company for him. He could not exist without her, because no one can be just half of a human being.

Ulysses is not a man. He's not Penelope's husband. He's a character Homer invented who also embodies an idea.

But what idea?

As all readers of Homer know, Ulysses went away for ten years, and then it took him ten more years to return to Ithaca. During that time, Penelope wove and unwove the shroud for her father-in-law.

Do you see the symmetry?

Ten years to go, ten years to come back for Ulysses.

Twenty years of weaving and unweaving for Penelope.

Both Ulysses and Penelope are doing the same things in different ways.

Ulysses is making war, and he experiences many things, visits many countries, loves many women. In a certain sense, we can say that Ulysses is our “hurry, hurry” side. He is always doing something. He represents the part of us that longs to do things, to have experiences.

Penelope, on the other hand, is weaving not only fabric but the fabric of her life and Ulysses’. During the day, she's weaving. During the night, she unweaves. Why? Not because of the suitors who want to marry her.

No. She's weaving and unweaving because she’s like a writer.

She embodies the creative side of every human being.

In each of us, there are two appetites, and both are appetites for learning. One to discover the world, to perceive it. The other to transform those experiences into thoughts, and sometimes into artistic works. One appetite for the world, the other from the world. That's what being a human being is.

As the aphorist and philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila wrote, “The absence of contemplative life turns the active life of a society into a swarm of pestilent rats.”

Without Penelope, Ulysses is not a human being: he’s a rat.

Penelope is the part every person must have to be not just a “featherless biped,” as Plato described it, but a human being. Ulysses is the part that every human must have to experience the world.

Without experience, no creation is possible.

But without creative work, without weaving, experience cannot be transformed into what makes us human—namely language.

The writer Robert Graves, following Samuel Butler, suggested that Homer might have been a woman. Many classics scholars now believe, however, that Homer’s works come from an oral tradition rather than the work of a single author. But if the author of The Odyssey consists of multiple entities rather than just one, that only reinforces the epic’s feminine side: an entity who is but goes unacknowledged.

From the characters of Penelope and Ulysses, we can see that the feminine is embodied not only in women, and the masculine is not just embodied in men—fortunately! But those two forces are manifested in each of us, as with yin and yang.

Our feminine part is our poetic side, whether you are a man or a woman.

Our masculine part is our pragmatic side, whether you are a man or a woman.

Nobody can be a human being having just one of those two sides.

When Penelope weaves and unweaves, she embodies the beautiful idea that there cannot be a human being without words. Penelope’s fabric is poetry. She might be Homer herself in a vertiginous mise en abîme. Homer, who gave voice to her characters, represented herself in The Odyssey as a weaver.

Every poet knows very well what Homer/Penelope goes through. You write all day, and then, the next morning, when you look at what you wrote the day before, you have to decide what to keep and what to leave behind.

But wait! There’s more. Despite all your efforts, the more you write, the more language eludes you.

And being a poet is knowing that, and still continuing to weave and unweave, to write and unwrite. Because creation is not only about producing a result; a collection of words is above all a path. What is important is to keep on creating. That’s what Penelope teaches us.

So Ulysses and Penelope are not a couple in the sense of wife and husband. They are a couple as two inseparable parts of every human being. Nevertheless—and Homer knew this—marriage may always be a reinterpretation of this first couple where the feminine and masculine try to work together; not only between men and women, but also inside each of us, uniting in a creative way our will to have experiences and our need to transform them into internal memories and spiritual aims.

Emmanuelle Malhappe began her career teaching literature and poetics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, and subsequently became a psychoanalyst. She has written plays, short stories, essays, radio programs, and poetry. Her poetry collection, Entre est le pays (Between Is the Land) was published by Éditions L’Harmattan in 2025. Her collection blending poetry and philosophy, Éclats de femme, silence du féminin (Fragments of Woman, Silence of the Feminine), was published by Éditions Ubik-Art Moresa in 2025. Also in 2025, the same publisher released her book poetry book J’ai posé ma main (I Placed My Hand). She received the Gaston Baissette Short Story Prize for her collection La Solitude des cygnes (The Solitude of Swans).

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest: