A couple days ago I explained why I respect but don’t celebrate Good Friday. A morning as fresh and bright as this one makes unbelief a dowdy thing. Anyway, A.R. Ammons wrote one of my favorite poems commemorating Easter: I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished: I holdContinue reading “‘The grave will not heal…’”
Tag Archives: Poetry
February 2024 reading
A rebuke to ersatz leftists like me who still think they can rattle the walls of an impregnable system, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) supports its title thesis by telling the stories of men and women born in imperial systems who created grassroots movements in Cape Verde andContinue reading “February 2024 reading”
Walking and reading
One of the last of the twentieth American formalist poets — a lot of adjectives to live down — Anthony Hecht wrote “A Hill,” “The Book of Yolek,” and a half dozen major poems whose lattice-like rhyme schemes don’t embalm their subjects. Too many draughts of his vintage will deaden my responses, I’ve found. WhyContinue reading “Walking and reading”
On 2023: the turning of the tide
To consider what awaits us Americans starting on Jan. 1 is enough to drive me under the bed with a bottle of Campari and a hardcover edition of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Three years ago the most uncertain and hence most dangerous part of the pandemic began to fade, slightly, with the promise of vaccines and theContinue reading “On 2023: the turning of the tide”
Keats and Yeats are on my side: Songs inspired by poetry
Who is Hugh Mearns? A poet whose catalog Bowie raided for “The Man Who Sold the World.” I had no idea. These songs relied on poems by Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, the Dadaist Hugo Ball, and most influential on me, Anne Sexton filtered through Peter Gabriel’s Fairlights. I have affection for The Bangles’Continue reading “Keats and Yeats are on my side: Songs inspired by poetry”
‘This is about waiting…’
“Rhythm is deep and it touches us in ways that we don’t understand,” Philip Levine told the Paris Review. “We know that language used rhythmically has some kind of power to delight, to upset, to exalt, and it was that kind of rhythmic language that first excited me. But I didn’t encounter it first inContinue reading “‘This is about waiting…’”
Louise Glück — RIP
“I want to substitute tone for fact,” poet Louise Glück revealed in a 2014 interview. “If you can get right the tone, it will be dense with ideas; you don’t initially know fully what they are, but you want by the end to know fully what they are or you won’t have made an excitingContinue reading “Louise Glück — RIP”
September 2023 reading
Blame Paul Westerberg for nudging me into reading my third John Updike masturbatory session novel. Drying out after the bibulous sessions for 1990’s All Shook Down, the Replacements frontman turned to John Updike, according to biographer Bob Mehr, and, as far as we know, did not go on a murder spree after finishing A MonthContinue reading “September 2023 reading”
‘Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter’
Study that mien. Rainer Maria Rilke looked more intently than the rest of us. Famous for his series of dense, allusive, penetrating lyric sequence the Duino Elegies, the German poet could not leave reality well enough alone. “Day in Autumn” has fewer surface complexities, but the last stanza upends and deepens what we have justContinue reading “‘Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter’”
‘Day after day, I become of less use to myself’
A specialist in longform verse whose enjambments owe more than a little to Pound and Snyder, Charles Wright can at times let his lines run away from him. Not in “After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard”: East of me, west of me, full summer. How deeper than elsewhere the duskContinue reading “‘Day after day, I become of less use to myself’”
‘I have no daughter. I desire none’
A fatalist whose death’s-head grin flashed whenever he wrote his perfect little rhymes, Weldon Kees disappeared from the world in the mid 1950s when his deceptively light verse rubbed against the sonorities of Lowell, Roethke, and Berryman. Admirers of Stephen Crane and Thomas Hardy will recognize the mordant humor. “For My Daughter” laughs hard atContinue reading “‘I have no daughter. I desire none’”
Comprending the Whole — a Good Friday post
Once, this was a day of dedication. First the ritual, then the silence. The Catholic Church specialized in filling our imaginative and sacral crannies with noise: hymns, communal prayer, homilies, the clacking of plastic rosary beads. Good Friday service ends with the priest stripping the altar of its cloths: a symbol of Christ’s humiliation onContinue reading “Comprending the Whole — a Good Friday post”
Humanizing The Vacuum 