LISTEN to my June 8th, 2021 WIOX Radio conversation with poet, editor and publisher Jared Daniel Fagen on his forthcoming poetry collection, The Animal of Existence and two books from his literary press, Black Sun Lit: I am writing you from afar by Moyna Pam Dik and Apostasy by Katy Mongeau.
Jared Daniel Fagen is the author of The Animal of Existence, which is forthcoming from Black Square Editions in 2022. His prose poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Prelude, and Caesura, among other places. Currently residing in Arkville, he is the editor of Black Sun Lit, a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an English instructor at the City College of New York. More @ jareddanielfagen.com
Jared Daniel Fagen on Black Sun Lit
…We propose a renewed aestheticism that values beauty- not communication or identification – as the end of literature. Beauty is for us the experience of the limit, an autonomy beyond that of life itself. We search for it in all forms of extreme expression: whether in minimalism or maximalism, ultramodernism or neotraditionalism, in the experimental or in the archaic, in a desire that exceeds the body or in the longing for boredom. Beauty is the encounter between the saint and the hedonist, the prostitute and the Buddha: a truth that, like staring into the face of Medusa, petrifies the gaze into a contemplation of nothingness. We value beauty that can be discerned in the fragmentary and the sacred, the dysfunctional and the erotic, the derelict and the obsessive…
“The tension between the lyrical and the practical, the soaring and the quotidian give her poetry its arresting and archetypical energy. A procession of gongs and silences, powerful and affecting. A poet to the bone. – Stanley Nelson, winner of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Award.
Season 3 Episode 1
Jared Fagen - Black Sun Lit
LISTEN to Season 3 Episode 1 on Spotify