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310 reviews

Kevin Fitzpatrick

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Kevin is Currently Reading

Kevin Fitzpatrick rated a book it was amazing

The Courage to Create

by Rollo May

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in August 2025

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Kevin Fitzpatrick said: " "We are living at a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born. We cannot doubt this as we look about us to see the radical changes in sexual mores, in marriage styles, in family structures, in education, in religion, technology, and ...more "

Aug 31, 2025 05:39PM · see review

Kevin Fitzpatrick rated a book liked it

Collected Prose

by Charles Olson

bookshelves: currently-reading

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read in August 2025

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Kevin Fitzpatrick said: " "feeling and desires and breath/
the cause of the words coming into existence/
ahead of them, the nose bringing them out ahead of its--/
self, and a principle, their own meaning, enough/
animus so it all has/
will

Feminine/
Writing so that all the World/
i "feeling and desires and breath/
the cause of the words coming into existence/
ahead of them, the nose bringing them out ahead of its--/
self, and a principle, their own meaning, enough/
animus so it all has/
will

Feminine/
Writing so that all the World/
is redeemed, and history/
and all that politics,/
and 'State' and Subjection/
are for once, done away with,/
as the reason/
of writing"
(Olson, "Places and Names," 1965)

Consisting of seven discrete segments ("Call Me Ishmael," "On Melville, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, and Pound," "Human Universe," "The Present is Prologue," "Poetry and Poets," "Space and Time," and "Other Essays, Notes, and Reviews,"), this collection of the prose of esteemed poet and theorist Charles Olson is filled with a panoply of prose pieces, everything from reviews of books, to poems themselves, to an almost book length exposition of the sources of Melville's "Moby-Dick," to meditations on the nature of knowledge in general and the sources of culture (and language) in the Semitic Near East. To say that Mr. Olson has access, in that capacious mind of his, to wide sources of study and arcane knowledge is to analogously suggest that Einstein liked to tinker in the laboratory: this man has the chops, both poetic and academic, to put much better known figures to shame! And these wide 'fields' (to use a term appropriate for the theorist of "Projective Verse") are communicated in gnomic fashion, as if just a tincture or touch of the 'stuff' (knowledge) was enough to elicit a cascade of thought that will have no end in sight! And, in the some of the areas, I was able to keep up with the weighty and lofty (and serious) ideas inherent in Mr. Olson's obtuse, syntactically-rich prose. However, due to my newness towards is oeuvre, perhaps, he left me behind at some points, struggling to maintain coherence as I processed his febrile mind's machinations and workings. This is not to say that I did not gain much from acquaintance with this prose, for the knowledge here is controversial, filled with a sense of 'agon,' and as such is well worth the needed time to decipher its contents. It just felt, to these neophyte eyes, that a 'context,' such as a classroom centered on Olson's thought, would be a necessity if one desires to truly conquer the "Everest" that is Olson's thought. In the end, this work should be seen, I would attest, as an exemplar of all that is deep and profound in 20th century poetic thought, but you need a "Virgil" to help conduct your way through the 'hell' of Olson's thought, the better to achieve the 'paradiso' at its conclusion. Mixed bag this book is! ...more "

Aug 24, 2025 04:42PM · see review

Kevin Fitzpatrick is currently reading

The Deerslayer or The First War Path (The Leatherstocking Tales, #1)

by James Fenimore Cooper

bookshelves: currently-reading, classic-literature

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May 30, 2025 10:53AM

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Kevin’s Quotes

“In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

tags: laws

139 likes

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

207 likes

“Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

tags: storytelling

82 likes