My old friend and former teacher Steve Orlen and I walked many miles together along the wide avenues of Tucson, Arizona. Our promenades usually took place after the dinner hour, in the evening, when the blazing heat of the Sonoran day had at last relented. An evening breeze would finally have arisen, and the little desert sparrows flew back and forth between the lofty crowns of the palm trees that line those streets.

I think of poetry as musical language, close to every day speech but of a higher order, with a system of notation.

That exalted moment when, out of nowhere, you are obliterated—completely, blissfully destroyed—by a voluptuous euphoria. A lightning flash of inspiration. That is white heat.

During the month of October 2018, two solo shows in Houston feature artists whose paths crossed fourteen years ago for this Art Lies interview.

Eliot said that modern poetry is required to be difficult to understand because modern reality is difficult. But some poets are going to want poems to be seamless and available and clear as distilled water, and maybe narrative and a lucid report on human nature and experience.

The epigraph: that little sentence or quote that precedes a story, chapter, or essay. Roxane Gay can’t stand them. Over the last decade, she’s made her case. In PANK in 2009: “[T]here is never a good reason for an epigraph in the creative form... I’m even starting to resent epigraphs in essays and short stories.” In a book review in 2011: “I never find the relevance of an epigraph no matter how hard I try.”

In 2004, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio exhibited paintings by Valdez related to prizefighting. The Houston writer Garry Reece published this review in Volume 44 of ArtLies, in which he traces the dubious history of professional fighting and compares…

A friend in England asked me just recently whether I thought her work had become too much like 'the last cry of a dinosaur.' I thought not, but it made me wonder whether the whole art endeavour wasn't a little like that dinosaur's last cry. Art has been…

Thursday, August 24, 2017 Hurricane preparation begins with a conversation about a small claims court case involving a batch of botched edible underwear. I am on the phone with my mother who is regaling me with her latest round of America’s Court binge-watching,…