June 5, 2019
“Song of Myself,” the Beer
“Sobriety,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1842, is “that virtue which every mother and father prays nightly” will reside “in the character of their sons.” Tell that to Bell’s Brewery, which […]
November 11, 2016
“We need to know how to go about reaching the next days of our lives”
Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” is going around again. W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is circling through social media, as it did after September 11. Why do we turn to poems […]
June 1, 2016
First Person Plural: Part I
I keep returning to the first person plural: we—what burdens, questions, complications, and opportunities come from a sense of collective self in poetry (and elsewhere). Even the most introductory sociology or […]
June 18, 2015
Teach This (Part II)
Yesterday afternoon, I hit “Publish” on a blog post reflecting on widely anthologized and widely taught poems. My intention was not to criticize those poems (there are many good reasons […]
February 12, 2012
Short Takes: Toward a New Past
A defense of the virtues of an art that’s seemingly more and more lost each year: memorization and declamation. William Gibson, on science fiction authors’ hankering for the way things […]
February 9, 2011
Short Takes
For your sweetheart, a top 10 Nabokov the lepidopterist (bonus points if you already knew that word) and ah! those memoirists (what to call her?) getting younger and younger talk […]
August 27, 2010
Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival
First, let’s clear our throats. Willie Perdomo That was Willie Perdomo at last week’s Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival. (I took all of these videos with my sweetie’s new […]
July 4, 2010
Ain’t That America
Today marks the 155th anniversary of the publication of Leaves of Grass. The 36-year-old Whitman had hoped to write a “new American Bible,” a work that you, the reader, might […]