October 1, 2014
The Sparrows in France
The Ortolans First, they are drowned in Armangac. Then, they are plucked. Their lemon-colored bodies, now featherless and plump, are laid in a white cassoulet dish, side to side. Their […]
October 1, 2014
Gerald Stern’s Encounters with the Sublime
In the introduction to his edited anthology of ecstatic poets, Gerald Stern wrote: “Ecstasy not only means to be ‘placed outside,’ that is, to be ‘placed outside the body,’ but […]
October 1, 2014
Mercury’s Passage: Poetry, Fracture, and the Talking Cure
And he still hawks poems like news, as welcome in heaven as in hell. —Austin Hummell, “Mercury” Mercury walks, if he walks, in either world, the highest and the lowest. […]
October 1, 2014
Foliage
Eighteen years with a man I’d once credited with having saved me from losing myself—a man who still, despite increasing estrangement, comes the closest to what I’d call a soul […]
October 1, 2014
All of Me
The touch of strangers still startles me. Unknown fingertips brushing the soft inside of my bicep, grazing the back of my shoulder, closing firmly around my forearm. I flinch, gasp, […]
July 1, 2014
On Being a Mother
After you acclimate to the sleep deprivation and the constant monitoring, the self-control to deny your own inherited impulses, the gentle management of some kind of hierarchy of development (create […]
April 1, 2014
Jerusalem
On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosts what he refers to in both his diaries and Autobiography as “the immortal dinner.” The stated reasons for the dinner […]
April 1, 2014
Idiom, Our Funny Valentine: Its Cunning, Its Romance, Its Power
I am driving around Houston, listening to a sermon by one of our many local radio evangelists. Call him Pastor James. Brother James is telling an anecdote about himself. The […]
January 1, 2014
George and John
The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George by Denise Gigante. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. 467+pp. $35.00, hardcover. Whatever else is required of it and whatever else […]
January 1, 2014
Mark Strand’s Luminous Nostalgia
An already tottering, manipulative king sets the action going in Shakespeare’s King Lear when he announces disingenuously that he plans to “unburdened crawl toward death.” Although a king does not […]
January 1, 2014
D. H. Lawrence’s Children
I D. H. Lawrence had no children of his own and resented his wife’s three children, whom he didn’t get to know until they were adults. But he had extraordinary […]
October 1, 2013
Captain Robert Bly, Ortega y Gasset, and the Buddha on the Road
“In 1787, The Bounty sailed for Tahiti. The ship was under command of the brutal Captain Bligh, who made life for those on board a living hell, with his ready […]