Dear John, I’ve been reading “Ten Things I Do Every Day” every day. “Now I don’t know anything anymore.” What does sacred, ordinary protocol have to do with knowing anything or with knowin...

I. “Dark to Themselves,” the eponymous poem of the sixth section of John Keene’s Punks, begins with a command, which also serves as an ars poetica:“Invent, experiment: chaos . . . / Liberate t...

One of the joys of encountering John Keene’s work is reading his many interviews. Out of respect for his interviewers and readers, time and again Keene finds ways to expand questions that risk closu...

“Long hours in the study of any text will reveal inner, unseen contours, an abstract architecture,” writes John Keene.((John Keene, Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas (New Directions, 2015), ...

“Oh, how delicious and practical it is that people think us strange . . . ” — Hilda Hilst, Letters from a Seducer, translated by John Keene At the outset of Hilda Hilst’s notorious anti-novel ...

*** “In the mark event, you enter your signature.” So begins Seismosis, John Keene’s 2006 book of poetry, published as a collaboration with the artist Christopher Stackhouse. The quoted line is ...

A student in my recent “Twenty-First Century African American Literature” seminar insisted, “We should stop using the phrase ‘Experimental Literature.’ All creative writing is an experiment....

One of the most remarkable features of John Keene’s thoroughly remarkable 1995 publication Annotations is that it manages to register as a distinctly African American work without even attempting to...