November 30, 2015
Thanks and Thanksgiving and Thank you
Thanksgiving was last Thursday, and giving thanks always makes me think of W. S. Merwin’s “Thanks”: Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on […]
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 […]
September 2, 2015
The Daniel Swiftboating of Helen Vendler
The knives are out again for Helen Vendler. In a recent review for The Spectator, Daniel Swift accuses the poetry critic of performing a bloodless “scientific evaluation of literature.” Her […]
October 31, 2014
Boo
It’s Halloween; let’s light the cauldron. Shakespeare’s weird sisters, when making their hell-broth, tossed in “Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog”—and, […]
October 25, 2014
100 Berrymans
Imagine 100 different John Berrymans, in 100 different replays of the past century. They’re all born on October 25, 1914—in McAlester, in Modesto, in Madison, in Montgomery. Some are privileged, […]
January 7, 2014
The Cold Is Cold
On today’s date, in 1972, we said goodbye to John Berryman. Or rather, he said goodbye to us, offering a brief wave before jumping off the side of Minneapolis’s Washington […]
November 18, 2013
Of Blogs and Bobbleheads
About ten years ago, a friend offered to buy me a custom-made bobblehead doll for my birthday. The question, then: Who did I want? Whitman seemed too obvious (I have […]
July 26, 2013
Distant Lands, Close Quarters
When I put my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to bed at night, the last thing I tell her is “I love you a lot.” The “a lot” feels crucial—not as an intensifier […]
July 10, 2013
Clerihew Day: The Return
I’ve been away from this blog for two and a half years, and it would be only a slight exaggeration to say I’ve spent most of that time writing clerihews. […]