January 1, 2013
Everywhere at Once, 1903
Author’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change (Indiana University Press, Spring 2013), a hybrid nonfiction text […]
January 1, 2013
A Thousand Nations
As Marcus and Alexander lay hands on me, I do not know it is the beginning of an exorcism they have planned. I believe it is only an unexpected outpouring […]
October 1, 2012
Demeter and Persephone in the Heartland
There is a landscape of fact, and there is a landscape of memory. My daughter and I drove across the fact of the Flint Hills of Kansas—an ocean of wintered […]
October 1, 2012
Authenticity and the Myth of the Lyric Subject: The Summons of Olson’s Legacy
Ever since 1950, when in his essay “Projective Verse” Charles Olson framed his summons to the ideals of a more spontaneous though no less formally conscious aesthetic, the notion of […]
October 1, 2012
Feeling Tense
What happens when a poem changes tense? Poetic language may change egregiously—diction, figure, syntax—but shifts in tense are so familiar, so endemic to ordinary speech, that they’re almost inaudible. All […]
July 1, 2012
Ginkgo Song
A one-legged man could make a killing on this street, a left-footed man, anyway, who wears a standard size. He could pluck that suede loafer, the two-tone saddle or dress […]
July 1, 2012
Fragments (Somewhat Charred)
These aphorismic fragments have turned up on one of the charred scrolls recently unearthed in what is thought to have been a private library in a villa in Herculaneum. Linguistic […]
July 1, 2012
Lowell’s Politics: Ambivalence and Commitment
I No poet today speaks on political issues with the authoritative voice and the decisive influence of Robert Lowell. Taking advantage of his prestigious name, his powers of expression, and […]
July 1, 2012
In Extremis: Literature and Revolution in Contemporary Cairo (An Oriental Essay in Seven Parts)
Theorem Here is a suitably exotic Sufi folk tale from the Nile Delta: The imam of the Friday prayers bumps into a little old dervish at the entrance to the […]
April 1, 2012
George Steiner and the Quest for Mystical Union
Literary criticism, in spite of the claims sometimes made for it, is opinion-sharing. The goal of criticism is not truth, though critics may tell themselves that; the goal of criticism […]
April 1, 2012
Bridges and Tunnels
Deep into hypnotherapy, I lift my right forefinger, signaling to Rachel, the practitioner, that I want to speak. “Where are you?” she asks. “It’s the train table in our basement,” […]
April 1, 2012
Selections from Jean Genet
From the French. Dream I dream about Genet from time to time, like I dream about my father. Both men have at least these two things in common: […]