Herman Melville Archive
Herman Melville and the Desolation of Solitude
I’d never felt the urgency to see Arrowhead, Melville’s historic home in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, but suddenly robbed of my own social life, it was time for me to go and see why a writer, like Melville, would actually ask for such isolation.
The Fancy and Imagination of Herman Melville
The frolicking of sailors aboard a ship’s deck reminds Herman Melville of young horses, which might lead him to the “gambols” of whales. In associations such as these, Melville shows us the incongruities and false gilding we add to life in order to make it more palatable, less terrifying.
The Dark Side of the Wild
How does the idea of the “wild” manifest itself in the lives, and ways of living, that contemporary America remains both fascinated by and deeply ambivalent about?
Lilies in the Yard: On Getting Away
I reread Sylvia Plath this summer on a fairly remote island off Ireland’s Connemara coast. Plath had been there once in September of 1962. She and Ted Hughes accepted an invitation from the Irish poet, Richard Murphy, to visit him at his home in the country’s heralded west.
Throwback Thursday: Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Though Bartleby, the Scrivener was published in 1853 and documents a world that’s vastly different from our own, it’s a strangely prescient text. The words and situations may be dated, but the sentiment feels familiar: it’s a horror story you’d expect to hear in our era of modernity.
A White Man Used An Asian Woman’s Name To Publish A Poem. Does That Change The Poem? Yes: A Brown Man Explains
By now you’ve probably read about the 2015 Best American Poetry scandal. For the uninitiated, the story goes like this: the anthology comes out with a contributor note by the editor, Sherman Alexie, which states that one of the poets included in the anthology, Yi-Fen Chou, is actually the
Harold Bloom’s Song of Self
Here’s the story of my first and only encounter with Harold Bloom. It was the first week of a new semester, my last semester of graduate school, and I was waiting in a stuffy seminar room packed with sharply dressed undergraduates. The luckiest students had secured seats around the grand
“An Essay Needs to be about Exploring”: An Interview with Angela Pelster
Angela Pelster is the author of Limber (Sarabande Books, 2014), for which she won the Great Lakes College Association New Writer Award. This book was first described to me as a “collection of essays about trees,” which is like saying Moby Dick is a book about a whale. Trees
Writing Lessons: Judith Conte
In our Writing Lessons series, writing students will discuss lessons learned, epiphanies about craft, and the challenges of studying writing. This week, we hear from Judith Conte, a student at the 2013 Kachemak Bay Writers Conference. You can follow Judith on Twitter @JudithConte. —Andrew Ladd, Blog Editor At the 2013