“Whether it’s prose you want to write or poetry, if you’re feeling blocked, simply open up Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
(Random House, 1985) to any page and begin declaiming in a grizzled and jaded voice his otherworldly descriptions of landscape, or Judge Holden’s discussion of chance, or the mules falling down the mountainside with the mercury in their sacks shattering into globes around them, or the static electricity coming off Glanton’s murderous gang as they remove their shirts at night. This is not just McCarthy’s greatest novel. The real interesting thing about this word-sequence is its nihilistic magic: Blood Meridian is the only literary masterpiece ever to have emerged from nihilism in about four thousand years of human literary activity. Its supercharged simultaneous existence in and above the worlds of fiction and poetry grants it an amphetamine-like ability to activate the verbal centers of the cortex. Be warned, though: Never imitate it.”
—Amit Majmudar, author of Dothead (Knopf, 2016)
Photo credit: Ami Buch Majmudar