The video of my appearance at the Charleston (SC) Literary Festival back in November was recently posted, which gives me an opportunity to once again thank Diana Reich, Sarah Moriarty, and the whole Charleston Literary Festival team, especially the crew at the splendid Dock Street Theatre who got...

After retiring from a career in healthcare and becoming “a rather late in life poet,” Charles R. Castle developed a fascination with aphorisms during the pandemic, a fascination fueled by W.S. Merwin’s translations in Asian Figures and his Voices of Antonio Porchia (see The World in a Phrase, pp ...

Thanks to Neil Denny for such a fun, wide-ranging conversation on the Little Atoms podcast, largely structured around consideration of individual aphorists from the book, including Jesus (12:00-14:50), Jean Toomer (20:00-22:05), Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker and Samuel Hoffenstein (24:15-26-35)...

One of the things that’s most fun about doing book talks is hearing all the aphorisms people share with me before, during, and after the talks. After a recent talk, Vincent Straub, a university student, handed me an envelope that contained a selection of his aphorisms, which are sharp, funny, and...

This is the talk delivered by George Murray at the International Aphorism Conference in Wroclaw, Poland on October 25, 2025. George is a Canadian poet, teacher, and editor. I’ve blogged about his aphorisms here and here. —JG

My talk today is about how I see the poetic aphorism as differing from t...