Epiphanies from Kostelanetz

Richard Kostelanetz

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Depicted above is the multifaceted writer Richard Kostelanetz, who has published enough to fill an entire bookstore, and I blog on him because he and I were both born on May fourteenth - though he beat me to the date by seventeen years - and because his "Epiphanies" are similar to my "One-Line Poems." Let me offer an example from page 214 of Emanations:

Their battle won, the enemy defeated, the general congratulated his men, "Beware of drink and women."

If the sentence sounds somewhat clumsy to you, you're probably reading it to the wrong beat, for Kostelanetz aims at not even a bit of clumsiness (cf. page 195), and what you might be hearing is an expected expression "congratulated his men" oddly linked logically to a following, incommensurable warning against alcohol and women. Properly read, not stumbling over a smooth if unexpected turn of a phrase, this accounts for much of the humor here, and a similar pattern is found in many other epiphanies. As for me in my one-liners, I don't aim at clumsiness either, but I sometimes stumble into it anyway, unlike Kostelanetz . . .

But back to the topic . . . Kostelanetz is very proliferic (as implied above), and if you're interested in more, then visit his website.