October 31, 2015
Lowell, Bishop, Berryman
In today’s New York Times, Christopher Isherwood reviews Dear Elizabeth, a play by Sarah Ruhl that tracks the friendship (mostly epistolary) of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Isherwood writes something […]
October 30, 2015
28 Days Later and Other Nightmares: On What Frightens Us
One of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, a horror flick that popularized the idea of a “fast-moving” zombie. Boyle’s walking dead are […]
October 30, 2015
On Flamenco: Ellison, Lorca, and Me
“Cante Flamenco, or cante hondo [sic] (deep song, as the purer, less florid form is called) is a unique blending of Eastern and Western modes and as such it often […]
October 29, 2015
Hello from the Other Side
I tasted once The milk of a woman friend, The milk of a sister— Not to slake my thirst But for the liberty of my soul. —“Memory of a […]
October 29, 2015
The box is only temporary: Plath and Apian Imagination
Tuesday was Sylvia Plath’s birthday (October 27), and I’ve found myself thinking of and rereading her “bee poems”–“The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings,” “The Swarm,” “Wintering”–five […]
October 23, 2015
Gwendolyn Brooks & a Poetry of Collective Self
One of the best-known poems in the first-person plural is probably “We Real Cool,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, which first appeared in Poetry in September 1959, and was then published in her 1960 […]
October 23, 2015
“This Balance Hangs in a Place That Is Not” : The Work of Michael Hafftka
In A Retrospective: Large Oils 1985-2003, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Michael Hafftka’s work at the Housatonic Museum of Art, Michael Bordsky compares the artist and the “creatures” of his paintings […]
October 14, 2015
The Literal Underground: On Bernie’s Hip Hop Night
In Columbus, our underground hip hop night was literally underground. Bernie’s Distillery sat below North High Street, accessible through a black staircase that carried you down 10 feet, past a […]
October 13, 2015
Stranger in the Midrahov: On Forgiveness
I think artists have a strange sense of happiness. It’s always a little painful. There’s an ache to touch something untouchable, but when we do, it disrupts, shakes, the borders […]
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 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 […]