Journal Article

Editorial

Harding, Paul

2016

Overview

For years, while I wrote and tried and failed to publish my first novel, those two stories-those two issues of the review in my bookcase, the one spine bright orange and robin's egg blue, the other two shades of slate purple-were the only evidence 1 had that I was a published writer, that I had work with my name on it in print which, as writers know, is practically the same as saying that they were the only evidence that I existed. The poetry in this issue offers as rich a feast as the fiction and essays, from Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi's translations of sections of Yi Lei's \"Love's Dance,\" which read as if taken from an atlas of dream, to Lauren Brozovich's \"The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers: Delamination,\" in which she \"peels back\" each layer of those glass flowers until she arrives at the human soul that made them. The idea of the \"anxiety of influence\" has always seemed like junk ideation to me, the kind of notion that would only occur to and be persisted in by someone who did not make art himself, who held art at arm's length, perhaps, in his mind, above.

• Publisher: Harvard Review
• Subject: Harding, Paul (1967- ) / McCracken, Elizabeth / Null, Matthew Neill / Thompson, Christina (1959- ) / Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)