The poet Paul Celan died in 1970: he committed suicide by jumping into the Seine. In 2011, Columbia Journal featured “The Last Breath of Paul Celan” in its forty-eighth issue. […]
Founded in 1977 at Columbia University's School of the Arts
The poet Paul Celan died in 1970: he committed suicide by jumping into the Seine. In 2011, Columbia Journal featured “The Last Breath of Paul Celan” in its forty-eighth issue. […]
To a certain extent, much of 20th-century thought was taken up by argument about religious faith’s relevance or irrelevance, and this affected literature. T.S. Eliot, for example, wrote that poetry […]
On April 22, 1995, the highly-regarded American poet Jane Kenyon died. Accordingly, Columbia Journal dedicated a portion of its Spring 1996 issue to her memory. This homage included two poems […]
“I am tired of women who are sad. I am tired of / Men who are tired.” The end of April is a good time to be finished with feeling […]
It isn’t difficult to want to write about the sea. The open ocean is a cliché that one can’t get away from—at least, I can’t, or don’t, want to. Of […]
I’ve never gone swimming in a river (I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a river considered clean enough to swim in), but I’ll never forget William Blake’s words in “The […]
Macbeth, to my mind, is a play that shouldn’t work but does. It’s quite clear that, politically, it served to flatter James I’s ego in the wake of the Gunpowder […]
Democracy is difficult to think about, difficult to write about, and difficult to live. At least, in 2022, a lot of people seem to believe so. Forty years ago, Jorge […]
January can be a rather miserable month: after the excitement of the new year, one is left with the same old grayness. But a poet finds potential newness in every […]
The fifty-ninth issue of Columbia Journal featured a poem by English poet Toby Martinez de las Rivas, and, as it so happens, I was given a copy of Rivas’s book […]
I’ve always been tickled pink by the thought of séances. To call back the dead and learn what they have to tell us: what a marvelous thing, and what a […]
As much of pop culture has been reminding us for a while now, fairy tales are quite a bit more irksome than Disney would have us suppose. And it is […]
Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel.