October 5, 2015
The Silence of Syrian Rue
Love is not the last room. There are others along the long corridor that has no end. —“On the Wall of a House,” Yehuda Amichai Yael lived in […]
September 30, 2015
Thirty-Odd Poets
As Robert Frost once wrote (riffing on a line from Hamlet), “Play’s the thing. All virtue in ‘as if.’” Last Thursday, at the New School, thirty-odd poets (the hyphen is important) […]
September 30, 2015
Imagining America
This weekend–starting tomorrow–I’ll be attending my first Imagining America conference. When I left Iowa City and my position as the director of the Iowa Youth Writing Project, I felt confident that new […]
September 29, 2015
He Looked Again, And Found It Was . . .
A couple of days ago on this blog, Dora Malech wrote: “In poetry workshops and literature courses, I always emphasize poetic turns (not just in sonnets) and the pleasures and […]
September 28, 2015
“What You Know, You Know”: Re-Reading Othello
As a man, Iago is a house of mirrors. At bottom, his desire, if it can be called that, is to be at the center, to be powerful even if […]
September 25, 2015
Is Paris Still Paris?
“In a beautiful turn of phrase, Hugo von Hofmannsthal called [this city] ‘a landscape built of pure life.’ And at work in the attraction it exercises on people is the […]
September 22, 2015
On the Wings of a Power Ballad: Atonement and Yom Kippur
* Phoenix the pyre the self-resurrected Obscures everything ardently briefly with ash —“Zone,” Guillaume Apollinaire When I fast on Yom Kippur, my prayers sound like this. In the film Under […]
September 11, 2015
Septembers
I think my hip hop band, The Wick, had a rehearsal the evening of September 11, 2001. I know I had British Literature with Dr. Summers. We had planned on […]
September 10, 2015
By Any Other Name: The Best American Pseudonym 2015
Not too long ago, a writer wrote a children’s fantasy book. It was rejected quite a few times, but eventually a publisher took interest. The writer’s name was Joanne, and […]
September 10, 2015
Extinction: The Illusion of Abundance
Reflections on The Paris Cop21, The Sixth Extinction, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, and Empire of Necessity I’ve been thinking about extinction, to be precise: the relationship of […]
September 2, 2015
The Daniel Swiftboating of Helen Vendler
The knives are out again for Helen Vendler. In a recent review for The Spectator, Daniel Swift accuses the poetry critic of performing a bloodless “scientific evaluation of literature.” Her […]
September 1, 2015
A Celebration of the University of Akron Press
The title of my July 31st post, “Not an Elegy for the University of Akron Press,” turned out to be, well, just that–not an elegy. In the wake of public outcry, […]