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.
Why I Reread “Paper Lantern”
Every Memorial Day my grandmother took flowers to the graves of people she had known, military or not. She was a southern transplant, with ancestors that fought on both sides of the Civil War, but she lived in my grandfather’s state, New Hampshire, so the graves she visited belonged
Good Poets You’ve (Probably) Never Read, Part I: Buckram and Burning Birds
Everyone has them—the books that we loved that got only cursory critical attention, if any. The friends who managed to get the books finally, finally into print, only to hear a few grains of sand shifting in the long silence as they drive to the liquor store to buy
Mood
Mood: a predominant emotion; disposition; a conscious state of mind. Etymologically, “mood” at its root is anger, anger and its sometime sidekick, courage, though, the book cautions us, mood’s ultimate origin is unknown. Because who can really say where a mood comes from? Construction on the freeway wastes an
Why I Reread “Simon’s Luck”
Alice Munro has been a popular literary writer of short stories for decades. She moves from subtle interior discomfort to the most blatant of coincidences without apology. “Simon’s Luck” is a short story from the book that could be called her only novel: The Beggar Maid. The book could
The Pit Bull
It feels as though every posting starts somewhere else, and this is no exception. I’ve been reading one of Angela’s “Why I Reread…” postings, in the midst of state and federal budget cuts which, far from rereading much of anything, seem designed to keep the world from reading most
Facing Night
What reaches for the sun. What turns green panes flat to the zenith. A green order in the bay window, quatrefoil. Egg-toothed cotyledon. ~ There’s something to know and it can’t be known and I have to know it. It wakes me up in the morning, shivers me through
Why I Reread This Boy’s Life
I sometimes take comfort in categorizations. The world can always be divided into two populations, it can be obnoxiously insisted: those who send thank-you notes and those who don’t, those who have seen American Idol and those who haven’t…those who get to class on time and those who can’t,
Step Away from the Tab Key…or Don’t
As a change from the didacticism and mostly-benign aesthetic dictatorship of my recent posts, and before I review anything (though that’s coming), perhaps it’s time I ask a question instead of attempting to answer any. Within recent memory I had cause—or thought I had, anyway—to post a link on