September 28, 2016
Donald the Ogre
W. H. Auden’s “August 1968” has been on my mind recently. The idea that a poet might compose an immediate response to a catastrophe (in this case, the Soviet invasion […]
September 7, 2013
Banga! Banga! Banga!
Patti Smith plays tonight at Detroit’s Majestic Theatre. I’ll be there, touching base with my three-decades-ago self, that self that used to sing along (badly) to cassette tapes of Horses […]
August 12, 2012
Vidal, Bradbury, and misanthropic virtue
That people die, authors included, is no strange fact—but it is made strange by the deaths of authors so large they seem immovable, pillars of the craft exempt from time […]
December 28, 2011
Blog Post: Two Revisitings
I read over my first posts to see if the remove of time could add any insight. It’s like sitting on a “finished” poem to see if it’s still good […]
December 21, 2011
Hitchens as a Man of Letters
The indifferent are not enemies of literature. They don’t value literature highly enough to do violence to it. The true enemy of literature is passionate about literature; he or she […]