NEW work by Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity An examination of the life and work of six brilliant minds of the twentieth century, intent on answering the question “What can be done not despite but because of loneliness?”
READ: Scott Stossel on This Exquisite Loneliness: The American Scholar: Connect or Die
READ reviews of This Exquisite Loneliness: Psychology Today; Wall Street Journal; Kirkus Reviews; Library Journal; publishersweekly.com
READ: Richard Deming, “Understanding Zora Neale Hurston’s Loneliness” in Literary Hub
READ interviews with Richard Deming: “Exploring and Writing about Loneliness” in Writer’s Digest; “‘Exquisite loneliness’: Yale writer reflects on isolation and creativity” in YaleNews
About Phylum Press Founder & Editor Richard Deming
Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman Books), received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. His most recent book of poems, Day for Night (Shearsman Books), appeared in 2016. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford UP, 2008), and Art of the Ordinary: the Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Literature, and Philosophy (Cornell UP, 2018). He contributes to such magazines as Artforum, Sight & Sound, and The Boston Review. His poems have appeared in such places as Iowa Review, Field, American Letters & Commentary, and The Nation. He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing. Winner of the Berlin Prize, he was the Spring 2012 John P. Birkelund Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.
In This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity , Richard Deming turns an eye toward that unwelcome feeling, both in his own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, to find the context of loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate this profound sense of discomfort. Deming explores how loneliness has served as fuel for an intense creative desire that has forged some of the most original and innovative art and writing of the twentieth century. This singular meditation on loneliness reveals how we might transform the pain of emotional isolation and become more connected to others and more at home with our often unquiet selves.
Deming's The Art of the Ordinary, The Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Philosophy, and Poetry, (Cornell UP, 2018), cuts across literature, film, art, and philosophy in a cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. Because, Deming writes, the ordinary is always at hand, it is, in fact, too familiar for us to perceive it and become fully aware of it. The ordinary he argues, is what most needs to be discovered and yet is something that can never be approached, since to do so is to immediately change it. READ MORE at Cornell UP.
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ORDER Touch of Evil
ORDER The Art of the Ordinary
ORDER Day for Night
ORDER Let's Not Call It Consequence
ORDER Listening on All Sides
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Selected Writing Online
Richard Deming: Thomas Struth’s unpeopled photos evoke the loneliness of urban life | Vox Populi
After Kurosawa and
Shall I Read from the History of the Battle of Thermopylae? in Conjunctions
Rooms (1) in Word for Word
From Some Elsewhere in Free Verse
Knock in Counterpath Online
