Aphorisms by Sami Feiring
Sami Feiring is a Finnish aphorist, a teacher of aphoristic technique, president of the Aphorism Association of Finland since 2005, and a founding member of World Aphorism Organization. He curates the Finnish Aphorism site, where a selection of Finnish aphorisms is available in translation in several languages. He also compiled an index to Geary’s Guide, [...]
Aphorisms by Mason Cooley
Alfred Kelly alerts me to the aphorisms of the late Mason Cooley, a professor of literature at the College of Staten Island and Columbia University, who died in 2002. There is not a lot of info about Cooley online, but the Cooley listing on poemhunter.com runs to over 200 pages and, by Mr. Kelly’s count, [...]
Aphorisms by Nick Piombino
Nick Piombino is a poet, essayist, psychotherapist, and aphorist. In Contradicta: Aphorisms, he has written sayings that “replicate some aspects of psychoanalysis in which two individual viewpoints are juxtaposed, working together to achieve understanding and insight.” Aphorisms themselves can be considered a kind of reading cure, if not exactly a talking one. Reading a good [...]
More Aphorisms by Steven Carter
You’ve read his oxymorons, you’ve read his parables, and you may well have read a previous selection of his aphorisms (but, alas, I can’t provide a link since that post disappeared in a catastrophic site crash), and now you can read more of Steven Carter’s aphorisms, from his New Aphorisms and Reflections, first and second [...]
Aphorisms and Metaphors by Randall Jarrell
Pictures from an Institution is Randall Jarrell‘s novel of academic farce. The book is supposed to be based on Jarrell’s own experience teaching at a progressive New England girls’ college in the 1950s. The novel is not really a novel at all, but a series of witty and cutting character sketches, very much in the [...]
Aphorisms by Brian Jay Stanley
Brian Jay Stanley is a practitioner of the long-form aphorism, a strand of aphoristic technique pioneered by people like Balthasar Gracian and Arthur Schopenhauer, a variant that borders on the parable but pulls up well short of the essay. Mr. Stanley’s Aphorisms and Paradoxes are outstanding examples of the form. An interesting aspect of the [...]
Metaphors by Mario de Sá-Carneiro
Mario de Sá-Carneiro was a Portuguese poet who died in 1916, at the age of 25, after swallowing strychnine. He attended law school in Coimbra, where he met and became close friends with fellow Portuguese poet (and aphorist) Fernando Pessoa. Both Sá-Carneiro and Pessoa were loners given to melancholy and depression. Pessoa’s sense of angst [...]
Aphorisms and Metaphors by Francis Ponge
The French author Francis Ponge, who died in 1988, practiced a kind of writing that occupies a space somewhere between definition and description. He wrote what he called “proems,” prose poems in which he contemplates and conjures ordinary objects, sometimes everyday things like cigarettes, soap, and doors, but usually aspects of the natural world like [...]
More Aphorisms by Thomas Farber
Thomas Farber returns with a new collection of epigrams, Hesitation Marks, from Andrea Young Arts. Farber also returns in excellent aphoristic form, with more mordant and amusing musings on sex, death, and … well, that just about covers it, sex and death being two inexhaustible subjects about which to commit “epigrammatics,” as Farber describes his [...]
Why Are There Fewer Female than Male Aphorists?
This question was prompted by a reader who recently raged at the absence of women in The World in a Phrase. There are 40-odd aphorists in that book and only four of them are women. (In my own defense, may I say that there are many more women, and many more aphorists in general, about [...]
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