August 13, 2013
Tangent on a Line by John Burgon
Consider the one-hit-wonder nature of some lines, poems, and poets. Like the famous description of “A rose-red city half as old as time,” which comes from the now-forgotten sonnet […]
August 4, 2013
Popular Art and the Unaccompanied Voice
An unaccompanied voice is almost never the voice you find in popular art forms. Even our most popular singers and rappers don’t get on a stage or on the radio […]
July 18, 2013
Pottery Glut
On Potter Island, everybody without a trade was trained to be a potter. They didn’t have to show any particular skill with their hands; all they needed was the […]
July 6, 2013
“Deeply and Irreverently”: How and What to Read
One of the usual defenses of reading widely in the Western tradition (or, say, in 20th century poetry) is that it improves your writing—that it’s the legwork necessary for the […]
June 30, 2013
The Lost Books of Lord Byron
I have read somewhere that you cannot read in dreams, that there is some neurological block against processing written language. I don’t remember where, maybe in a dream. Because I […]
June 28, 2013
What Makes Contemporary American Poetry So Good
One of the most wonderful things about being a writer in contemporary America—besides the unprecendented ease of access to books—is our multiplicity of traditions. In the past, in smaller, more homogenous […]
June 4, 2013
Food For Thought, Force-Fed
What is interesting about the force-feeding of inmates at Guantanamo is, first of all, that you have a bunch of supposedly radical, violent Islamists espousing a protest technique, the stubbornly […]
June 3, 2013
On the Approaching 100th Anniversary of Tagore’s Nobel Prize
To understand Tagore, we 21st-century readers must expand our notion of what a “writer” is and does. No writer, Indian or American, is to his or her country what […]
May 30, 2013
The Done Deal: Drones, Legality, and Morality
A scandal about the IRS targeting the President’s political enemies breaks one week; the very next week, the President makes a speech about limiting drone strikes and giving them a […]
May 23, 2013
The Regression to the Primitive
Northrop Frye, discussing the arc of Shakespeare’s plays, says something very profound about Shakespeare’s late “Romances,” like A Winter’s Tale and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. …as a dramatist, […]
May 11, 2013
Neureligion
There is very little (if any) variability in the brains of human beings regarding cortical localization. That is, the motor cortex responsible for, say, left arm movement, is reliably […]
April 21, 2013
Goodreads Review of Reality’s New Thriller, THE PRESSURE COOKERS
One way to understand the fundamental difference between nonfiction and fiction is to consider how what works in one doesn’t work in the other. There are elements of structure, pacing, […]