September 22, 2015
And Then I Burst Into Tears
Yes, it’s gourd season—but for those of us who teach, it’s also syllabus season and course-packet season. I’ve joked before that I expect to be buried with my course packets; […]
June 5, 2015
My My Emily Dickinson
Last week I finally visited Emily Dickinson’s house, a place that had haunted me as though I’d been there before but couldn’t recall the wallpaper, and couldn’t let go of trying […]
April 26, 2015
No Strings
James Spader is profiled in today’s Times. He plays the robot villain in Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron—but for me he’ll always be Graham Dalton, the all-too-human center of […]
March 26, 2015
Beknowst & Un-
(Part 2 of 2 on the fragment) Scripted mostly on used envelopes, or the odd chocolate wrapper, the collected fragments left by Emily Dickinson comprise some of the most famous […]
March 3, 2015
Night Thoughts (I)
Dickinson’s dashes and erratic capitalizations seem unusual or eccentric only to those who are unfamiliar with 19th century letter-writing. Byron’s letters, for example, are punctuated entirely in Dickinsonese, and similarly […]
February 11, 2015
Nerve Games, Love Notes
…for they had begun the rare epistolary communication that seems, somehow, more real than bodily contact, with its averted eyes and fidgety hands, its blushes and shuffling feet. –Brenda Wineapple […]
January 16, 2015
Searching for Argos—Dogs in Karen Green’s Bough Down
I started Early— Took my Dog —is the opening line of a poem by Emily Dickinson, a line that I have mentally cut out with scissors, leaving behind And visited […]
December 10, 2014
Earl Sweatshirt’s Bookshelf, and Time
Bookshelves do funny things to time. In a recent clip, rapper Earl Sweatshirt lets FADER TV tour his Hollywood bachelor pad. In a Cribs send-up, he guides the camera through […]
December 10, 2014
The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky
Why write? Why read? Why get up in the morning? The answer may be that we’re curious creatures. We want to find out what we think (so we write). We […]
May 27, 2014
Ars Prosaica: On Lines and Sentences
When I have a point to make, I write prose; when I have a sound to make, I write verse. This is a distinction based on ends. There is […]
January 4, 2014
Esoteric and Exoteric: On Dickinson and Shakespeare
When I go back into my own archives—old floppy disks, ancient dot-matrix printouts off an Apple II GS—I find that my earliest poetry (written in my mid-teens) falls into two […]
January 1, 2014
Out with the Auld
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Of course not, says experience, and conscience, and (answering his own question) Robert Burns. So we raise our cups o’ […]