October 15, 2018
Was Philip Roth a White Male Author?
It’s been four months now since Philip Roth died, long enough in our fast-paced media world that all the eloquent and moving obituaries have largely dissolved into a broader consensus […]
October 10, 2018
William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson”
If Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s project in the Cantos and The Waste Land is, in Patersonian terms, to pull “the disparate together to clarify and compress,” then Williams’s project […]
October 8, 2018
On The English Patient
Last week, a piece called “The Movie Assassin” made the rounds on social media, part personal essay on the struggles of being a movie reviewer, part analysis of our society’s […]
October 4, 2018
Hume, Locke, Rawls, and the Roots of Social Justice
In this time so full of social justice questions, I decided to go back to a grad school textbook, Social Justice (edited by Mathew Clayton and Andrew Williams), to get a […]
October 2, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – October
This is a love story. This is the story that led me here, writing to you about how and why I fell in love with poetry, and what I think […]
October 1, 2018
On Writing What You Know
I have in my hands the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle—it has the now-familiar square shape of an Archipelago Books publication and a yellow cover with an […]
September 29, 2018
New Origins
Poetry may often come to us in small packages and brief passages, but poetry is rooted in our big human questions: who are we? how (and why) did we get […]
September 28, 2018
Re-Reading Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood”
Narrated by disembodied exclamations, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood is, indeed, a “play for voices.” The play slowly reveals the image of a town through its layering of verbal snippets. […]
September 25, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – September
“I, too, dislike it.” Marianne Moore, “Poetry” But you don’t hate it. At least that’s what I hope you’ll discover as you read this column. I don’t want to convince […]
September 21, 2018
An interview with Louisiana Poet Laureate Jack Bedell
Dr. Jack Bedell is a Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University and the author of nine books, including Call and Response (with Darrell Bourque, 2010), Come Rain, Come Shine […]
September 20, 2018
How to Write an Ideological Novel
It is a truth if not universally then at least widely acknowledged that all fiction is inherently political. In fact, today, many writers would argue that all fiction should be […]
September 19, 2018
A Book to Help You Talk to Your Kids About Immigration
I went in search of books for children on immigration recently when deciding how to talk to my son about this topic. I found Cynthia DeFelice’s Under the Same Sky. […]