Craig Svonkin

Craig Svonkin wasted his youth wandering the real or imagined streets of Southern California. He currently serves as Executive Director of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association and Professor of English at MSU Denver. He is a fan of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson’s meta-museum, Disneyland, the Muppets, and most things fake, faux, or simulated. Craig’s published essays include “A Southern California Boyhood in the Simu-Southland Shadows of Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room” and “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering.” He has also published on family structures as seen in literature, comics and picture books, the poets Robert Lowell and Frank Bidart, urban spaces and unusual museums, children’s poetry, and the novelist John Fowles. He is currently working on The Bloomsbury Handbook to Contemporary American Poetry, a number of children’s books, and the unlikely-to-be-published-anytime soon novel, The Book of Craig. You can also visit his gallery of illustrations here.

“Sentence”

Have you ever wondered if you could write a sentence so long, erratic, and irrational that it would snake in and through your house, into your bedroom, drawing room, bathroom, dining room, up and down flights of stairs and into your cluttered attic, down the back stairwell and out through the kitchen and pantry, onto the veranda, drawing your reader in and out of windows, doors, around the house and through the summer house, then through a labyrinthine garden of trees, shrubberies, topiaries, into a secret garden, circling around a peach tree, an orange tree, a persimmon tree, then through a hidden doorway and back and forth through a topiary hedge maze, over the back fence and into and through the wild woods, jumping and climbing over, under, and through fallen trees, up sloping, roughly wooded banks, to the edge of a precipice, then clattering down a sloping trail of slippery rocks to the creek that runs down to a raging river, only to jump that creek and crash through the thick forest beyond, falling onto the highway, and then jumping to its feet just in time to avoid oncoming traffic, only to stumble and limp into the town beyond, bruised, battered, unstable but alive, arriving at the pub and entering its dark, warm depths with such a wild, disheveled, scratched and bloodied expression that the locals would look wide-eyed and fearful at its unexpected arrival?

“Aphorisms for the Reticent, Lazy, and Ill Informed”

Aphasia comes in all shapes and barflies.

Fireworks are all well and good, but are generally lacking in humility.

I’m a perfect potato chip in an imperfect world.

A pound of flesh is nothing. I would give two pounds if it would mean I’d gain your love!

I don’t believe in 90% of what I believe.

America was my gateway drug.

They sold the family farm for a euphemism.

Advice for the day: Embrace the cliche. Then pee on it. Then punch it in the face.

Serfing is the “new” American pastime.

I’m getting better at ignoring things. It just takes not practicing.

Tight slacks aren’t very American. The most American attire is a muumuu—expansive, with room for more and more!

High-five self-delusion! You are my best friend.

I’m a Jewish tailor at a KKK rally.

Not all paper cuts are created equal.

Realism is my least favorite ism.

I love piers: bridges to fucking nowhere.