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

Thursday, July 2, 2026

The New American Crisis

In the winter of 1776, Tom Paine wrote a pamphlet called The American Crisis to rally the citizens of the United States at a turning point in history. It was just after the Declaration of Independence, when the British empire responded by sending the most powerful army on the planet to crush the American insurgents. The troops of King George forced George Washington’s soldiers to retreat from New York and then pursued the Americans until they finally sought safety across the Delaware River, with many wounded, their uniforms in tatters, and few provisions and little shelter for the harsh winter to come.

Tom Paine, author of The American Crisis

That was the moment when Tom Paine wrote his famous words, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” It was a low point in the battle for liberty and democracy in the United States, just as we are at a low point today. Now, in 2026, the enormous gains of several generations have been shoved aside in the space of two nightmarish years. Each day, the news is like multiple slaps in the face to all those who hold dear the principles of liberty, justice, equality, diversity, and sustainability.

Our souls are being tried, as we withstand a hurricane of negative news—medical benefits denied to the most needy while billionaires are lavished with tax breaks; hardworking, law-abiding people ripped from their homes and deported, often separating family members; U.S. citizens protesting peacefully who are murdered in the streets; United States threatening our closest and most loyal allies with colonizing their lands and denying them the support that they have given us in wartime; the federal government attempting to undermine the most sacred rituals of democracy, the ballot and the right to equal and fair representation; the leaders of the USA and their cronies indulging in a rampage of corruption on a scale never seen before in history; this regime denying the indisputable evidence of an environmental emergency that we have the power and technology to reverse if we will only recognize and act on the science; the officials who should be the guardians of public health embracing crackpot theories that no responsible doctor or researcher gives credence to, endangering countless infants and children. And that is only the visible surface of a wound that goes deep into the body politic of the United States.

It’s not surprising that so many are losing hope in the ability of the United States to turn itself around, to recover faith in its national mission. But the United States has withstood many crises, the advances of King George’s army in Tom Paine’s time being just one in American history. There was the challenge of the Civil War that threatened to slice the United States in half, with one part taking up arms to try to perpetuate slavery and the lie of racial superiority. There was the advance of fascism in the middle of the twentieth century that saw the U.S. Pacific fleet decimated at Pearl Harbor, and Nazi troops only a channel away from subjugating all of Western Europe.

Yes, the United States of America is no stranger to crises. But crises require leadership, vision, and eloquence to counter the opponents of liberty, who have a way of hypnotizing the desperate. These are the times that try our souls, and Americans have to be equal to the challenge, to protest peacefully, vote, file lawsuits, pass legislation, write postcards, donate, phone representatives and voters, canvas door-to-door, poll-watch, and talk to neighbors and friends about what is really going on, and how much better the United States can be.

We say to those now in power in every branch of the U.S. federal government, and in so many of the states of the USA: our love of humanity will soar above your hatred; our soul is mightier than your denial of common decency to strangers; our grit and passion for justice will outlast your lust for personal plunder; our faith in a beautiful United States with every race, religion, national origin, and gender quilted together shall overcome your narrow, superannuated bigotry; and the USA will once again be a lighthouse that shows that diversity, equality, and justice are the foundation of the United States and of the family of nations.

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. www.zackrogow.com

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Monday, June 22, 2026

The Second Generation of New York School Poets

The New York School of Poetry leaped into the North American literary scene in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some of the leading writers of that school were Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler.

Writers from the first generation of New York School Poets (left to right:)
Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler

Ted Berrigan, a successor to those poets, pointed out that the New York School didn’t have a program or a manifesto, unlike other literary movements, such as Dadaism or Surrealism. What united the New York School poets was what they loved: spontaneity, urban and pop culture, and jagged juxtapositions of conversational and formal speech that often made a reader grin:

I had just finished the last chapter of my biography of the
Buddha, The Yoghurt and the Revolution, and I was GLAD to eat.
It was raining
your letter never arrived
I opened it, though…

—Frank O’Hara, “The Lunch Hour FYI”

That lighthearted, casual irreverence of the New York School contrasted sharply with the stuffy, often rhymed poetry that was common in wainscoted university English departments in the 1950s and early 1960s in the U.S.A.

In one sense, the trajectory of the New York School of poets was similar to many avant-gardes in the arts.

It’s often not the founders of an artistic movement who make the best use of their own innovations, but the second generation or the fellow travelers who add emotional depth to a new style. Think of the Surrealist movement in France. The Surrealist Manifestos advocated for automatic writing, a method of purely spontaneous composition that didn’t allow for planning or editing. That Surrealist doctrine unearthed the dazzling imagery of the unconscious, but it didn’t leave much space for in-depth feeling. It wasn’t the creators of the Surrealist style who actually made the most of their aesthetic, but the poets who blended the hallucinatory images of automatic writing with deep emotion: Pablo Neruda, Robert Desnos, Federico García Lorca, and Joyce Mansour, for example.

The New York School of Poetry followed a similar path. The first generation (Ashbery, O’Hara, etc.) showed that conversational language, humor, and collage could create fun and poignant effects. But toeing the Modernist party line often kept those poets from expressing emotion in a way that transcended fragmentary collage or glib, prosy diction.

The next wave of writers of the New York School went in two opposite directions. One group went even further toward fragmentation (the “Language poets” and their circle) and/or prosy diction (the East Village poets in the orbit of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bouwerie).

Personally, I’m more interested in a different group of poets who spun off from the New York School, the ones who took a more narrative turn. Those writers were influenced by the informal tone of the New York School and their embrace of pop culture, but they heightened the story or journal-like elements in that style. That group developed partly out of what Frank O’Hara called his “I do this, I do that” poems, works like his masterpiece, “The Day Lady Died,” that were almost a poetic diary. The more narrative group of second generation poets was also pulled in the direction of stand-up comedy—like poetry, stand-up involves a solo performer in front of an audience talking about personal topics, and stand-up evolved in New York.

Those more narrative heirs of the New York School included Bill Zavatsky, Edward Field, Robert Hershon, and Alan Feldman (though he ultimately left the Big Apple for New England). To my mind, that second generation also includes women writers like Joan Larkin and Enid Dame, whose legacy can also be traced through feminist poetry. I’m using the term New York School loosely here, gathering under that wide roof a variety of writers in New York in the 1970s and 80s who were influenced by the first generation of the New York School.

Writers from the second generation of New York School Poets (left to right:)
Bill Zavatsky, Edward Field, Robert Hershon, Alan Feldman, Joan Larkin, Enid Dame

The second generation of New York School writers recounted experiences from daily life, but clayed them into a story or a theme, with compressed or imaginative diction that added the poet’s touch. Here’s an example:

Edward Field

The Statue of Liberty

All the ships are sailing away without me.
Day after day I hear their horns announcing
To the wage earners at their desks
That it is too late to get aboard.

They steam out of the harbor
With the statue of a French woman waving them good-by
Who used to be excellent to welcome people with
But is better lately for departures.

The French gave her to us as a reminder
Of their slogan and our creed
Which hasn’t done much good
Because we have turned a perfectly good wilderness
Into a place nice to visit but not to live in.

Forever a prisoner in the harbor
On her star-shaped island of gray stones
She has turned moldy-looking and shapeless
And her bronze drapery stands oddly in the wind.

From this prison-like island
I watch the ships sailing away without me
Disappearing one by one, day after day,
Into the unamerican distance,

And in my belly is one sentence: Set Freedom Free,
As the years fasten me into place and attitude,
Hand upraised and face into the wind
That no longer brings tears to my eyes.

Amazingly, Edward Field published this prophetic poem in 1963 (in his collection Stand up, Friend, with Me). It’s a New York School poem not only because of its setting, but because it sandwiches popular culture, quotidian life, and a sophisticated viewpoint. The speaker expresses the thought that the ideals of American and French freedom have faded in the current era. I love the idea that the Statue of Liberty is a French woman. I also admire the ending, where the speaker is no longer even able to shed tears for the foregone loss of nature and freedom in his homeland. Edward Field uses the word “unamerican,” a reference to the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress, which was then conducting a witch-hunt into left-wing movements (sound familiar?). But the poet disarms the word “unamerican” by depriving it of its capital letters and by satirically using it to describe anywhere outside the United States. The “star-shaped island” suggests the stars in the U.S. flag, but also Hollywood stars, who became icons of another kind of liberty. With all those touches, Edward Field gave this poem heart and complexity.

One thing I appreciate about Edward Field’s “The Statue of Liberty” is that it shows how the second generation of New York School poets transformed the first generation’s aesthetic. Many of the second generation of New York School poets deepened the movement by adding to its breezy, direct diction by applying multiple layers of narrative, meaning, and emotion.

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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

Friday, May 15, 2026

Interview with Novelist Lynne Kaufman on The Oxford Affair

Your novel The Oxford Affair flirts with different genres: mystery, romance, comedy. Do you think of the book as falling into a genre? Is it important for a novel to have a genre?

Lynne Kaufman: I don’t think about genres when I write or when I read. When choosing a book to read, I’m drawn by the subject and the freshness and quality of thought and language. So, no, I stay away from genres. I do have favorite writers such as Rachel Cusk and Annie Ernaux. Their work is blessedly short, truthful and genre-free.

Lynne Kaufman, Novelist and Playwright

You’ve written many plays, and several novels. When you get an idea for a story, how do you know if it should be written as a work of fiction, or for the theater?

LK: I love compression, and I also like dialogue that reveals character and moves the story forward. Plays are my natural form. I find novels a slog to write, too many words, and too much description. Don’t we all know what the sky, the ocean and furniture look like? I only attempt a novel when an idea won’t leave me alone and the story moves around too much for a play or needs a lot of introspection. On two occasions, The Secret Museum and Divine Madness, I wrote a novel on the same theme as the play I had just written. I just wasn’t finished.

What made you decide to narrate the story of The Oxford Affair using a first-person narrator? Did you consider a third-person narrator, and if so, why did you prefer having a character in the plot tell the story?

LK: Writing a novel in the first person is as close to writing a play as I can get. I see every character in relationship to my protagonist and her point of view. One voice and one consciousness is about all I can handle. So no omniscient narrator for me.

In some ways, The Oxford Affair is a mystery for mystery writers. The engaging and funny main character/narrator, Susan Klein, is taking a class on the traditional mystery novel at an adult education program at Oxford University. Why did you decide to include that course in the book? Did you follow the traditional rules for writing a mystery in this book?

LK: The mystery class and its reflection in the events of the novel are plot devices. I was relieved to come up with the idea, as this is the first mystery I’ve written. I didn’t follow the traditional rules for writing a “cozy,” or a detective story with an educated main character and little violence. For example, I introduced a romance. In general, I don’t believe in following rules in writing. Or in anything else if I can avoid it. The law, yes. Rules, no.

The details about Oxford University—its personalities, customs, history, and buildings—are authentically recreated in this book. How did you manage that?

LK: For twenty-five years I directed the University of California, Berkeley’s summer program at Oxford University. I had lots of observation and participation to draw on, and then I also did research to back it up. I had the unique benefit of having worked and hung out with the faculty, the staff, and the students.

There’s a deeply felt interlude in the book where the main character leaves Oxford to deal with a family emergency back home. Why did you decide to take the plot away from its comfortable, university setting at that point in the story?

LK: I wanted to reveal the protagonist Susan in the most personal part of her life, show her vulnerability, her deep love for her daughter and mom. It also let me show how helpful her suitor Nelson was and to give her a chance to miss him. And since we had met Nelson’s ex, I wanted us to see Susan’s ex. She clearly had better taste.

The descriptions in The Oxford Affair appeal to all five senses, particularly to taste and smell. How did you weave into the action of a scene the sensory experience of the characters?

LK: As a playwright I usually don’t pay attention to sensory details unless the set is on fire, so that’s why I made Nelson a restaurateur. Food I can get into, especially English high tea and French nouvelle. I gained five pounds while writing The Oxford Affair.

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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

Friday, April 17, 2026

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus

Thomas Mann wrote his doorstopper novel Doctor Faustus late in life, long after his more widely read works of fiction, including Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain.

Thomas Mann, 1875–1955

It sometimes happens that a writer, toward the end of a career, attempts a massive opus that takes farther innovations that author started to explore earlier. Mann’s Doctor Faustus is that sort of book. You could also group in that category James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. Often those late-in-life bids for the magnum opus, or great work, end up more as fodder for literary critics than as a good read. Maybe that’s because the writer has gone several steps too far in developing their favorite stylistic devices and topics.

I have several reservations about Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, about the characters, the content, and the style. But it’s still a remarkable book. I’ll get to the amazing part, but first I have to kvetch a little.

The narrator of Doctor Faustus, Serenus Zeitblom, is a lifelong friend and obsessive chronicler of the novel’s main character, the classical composer Adrian Leverkühn. We have to take for granted Serenus’ description of Adrian as an “extraordinary human being,” and a great artist. But nothing in the novel makes us believe that Adrian is an extraordinary person, since his interactions with other people are puerile and condescending. Nor is the fuddy-duddy narrator Zeitblom very likeable, even if his fussiness and overly apologetic tone are at times funny. A novel where the main character is distasteful and the narrator is pedestrian—that’s a huge pill for a reader to swallow for their own good!

Mann also spends an enormous amount of time describing nonexistent musical works that Adrian composes. When Mann has Adrian speaking or writing in the archaic language he uses, the book moves along like a cart drawn by an old horse and missing a wheel.

There were times I felt that reading Doctor Faustus was a self-inflicted punishment. Nevertheless, I finished the book, tugged along by truly stunning moments that rewarded my patience, moments that are the most striking I’ve ever read by Thomas Mann.

For instance, in turns out Mann was holding out on us before Doctor Faustus. Who knew that Mann had incredible insights into love and passion? He sidestepped those topics in many of his earlier works. I love this quip by Mann in Doctor Faustus about relationships: “There are people with whom it is not easy to live; but to leave, impossible.” (All English quotes are from the Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter translation.)

And this penetrating comment about an affair between a married woman and a younger man:

“Passion is too much taken up with itself to be able to conceive that anyone would be seriously against it.” Mann trowels even deeper into that dangerous liaison, adding, “the joy, the love and suffering, did not come into their own if they remained wordless… The more secret they were, the more they required a third party, the intimate friend, the good man, to whom and with whom one could talk… ” The narrator Serenus Zeitblom becomes that confidant for the lovers.

Mann also makes some amazing statements in Doctor Faustus about music and language: “Music and speech, he insisted, belonged together, they were at bottom one, language was music, music a language; separate, one always appealed to the other, imitated the other, used the other’s tools, always the one gave itself to be understood as substitute of the other.” No one on Earth has ever said that better!

Mann’s descriptions of the natural world and the cosmos in the novel are also breathtaking. For example, he describes Adrian’s father’s love of books on nature and insects: “Clearwings were there depicted which had no scales on their wings, so they seemed delicately glassy and only shot through with a net of dark veins. One such butterfly, in transparent nudity, loving the duskiness of heavy leafage, was called Hetaera esmeralda. Hetaera had on her wings only a dark spot of violet and rose; one could see nothing else of her, and when she flew she was like a petal blown by the wind.”

Mann is quite witty on the subject of artists who embrace an outdated style and turn their backs on contemporary art. He says about these artists that they, “persuade themselves and others that the tedious has become interesting, because the interesting has begun to grow tedious.”

On a similar note, Mann writes, “For just as little as one understands the new and the young, without being at home in the traditional, just so must love for the old remain ingenuine and sterile if one shuts oneself away from the new, which with historical inevitability grows out of it.” In its own fussbudgety way, Thomas Mann had a revolutionary outlook on the arts.

My favorite chapter in Doctor Faustus doesn’t concern the principle characters in the novel, who all lack emotional appeal for me. But I loved Chapter XXXVII, where the impresario Saul Fitelberg tries in vain to persuade composer Adrian Leverkühn to abandon his retreat from the world in rural Bavaria and to move to Paris to become the darling of the salons and concert halls. Fitelberg’s half-German, half-French monologue is a hilarious satire both of the avant-garde and of its critics.

In a way, the real protagonist of Doctor Faustus is not one of the novel’s characters, but the nation of Germany. The book tells the story of that country in the twentieth century, its selling of its soul to the devil, and the terribly tragic inability up till then of German culture to find a political expression of its greatest and most humanistic triumphs.

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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: