“I couldn’t write the sort of stuff most people like if my life depended on it.”
—Marvin Cohen
For seventy years, from his first appearance in print beside Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to his last emails, Marvin Cohen (1931–2025) wrote about writing. Connected Dot to Dot, edited by Colin Myers, collects what he had to say on the subject, drawn from Cohen’s voluminous archive of uncollected and unpublished dialogues, essays, and poems, and from the flood of emails he sent friends in his final years, still punning his way toward the heart of the matter.
Included are his 1965 Harper’s Bazaar meditation on Yeats, his reflections on Paul Theroux, Henri Michaux, James Laughlin, e.e. cummings, Shakespeare, and Cole Porter, a conversation with Ted Berrigan and George Oppen, and interviews with Cohen spanning four decades.
Marvin Cohen (1931–2025) was the author of numerous novels, plays, and collections of short pieces, including The Self-Devoted Friend, Others, Including Morstive Sternbump, and Baseball as Metaphysics. He lived in New York City.