I only hope we may sometime meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write.
– Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman, February 1876
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‘Behind every man I want to kiss lies that original desire, which it is my nature and my fate to displace.’
I only hope we may sometime meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write.
– Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman, February 1876
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
Mark Doty is the author of eight poetry collections including, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008 and My Alexandria, which won the 1995 T. S. Eliot Prize. What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life will be published in April 2020. He lives in New York City.
Photograph © Rachel Eliza Griffiths
‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’
‘When I was seventeen, a freshman in college living in my parents’ house, I met Ruth at a poetry reading.’
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
Will Self and Mark Doty's discussion with Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing about blood, the surprising relationship between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman and the nature of addiction.
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