Monthly Archive:: June 2011
Compost Season
It’s that time again. My university’s semester has ended, and while this does not, alas, mean that I’ve logged any hammock time, nor that all my interns for August are placed, nor yet that a certain grisly assessment report is approved by all relevant parties…it does mean opening the
Culinary Art
The shapely tesserae of a well-chopped onion. Butter and flour foaming into roux. The beauty of texture, the formal grace: the rough seed husk and the slippery seed. Precision in small things. The hours spent simmering and adjusting, simmering and stirring till the earth is in it. Knifecraft; the
“In a Pig’s Eye:” Why I Reread “Rock Springs”
By the time I first read “Rock Springs” by Richard Ford, I had already crossed the country seven times by car, four of them through the eponymous town. One of these times my friend and I were on a road trip just for the sake of it. Or for
Daedalus and Perdix, Bill and Ted, Crabs and Buckets
I began this week by writing about compost…and that, if you’re just breathing a sigh of relief, is still to come, probably next week. Compost, however, has been preempted by word of a minor scuffle back in the northeast, of the type all too familiar in academic circles. It’s
The Aftermath of Reading
When does a poem become real? When does it cease to be a scribble, fragment, scheme, or intention, and assert its own particular vision of completeness? If it’s a poem when it’s printed in Ploughshares, it must have been a poem when it was still scrawled in a notebook.
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