Yellow Bellied Sapsucker & a Lone Wild Turkey
Pretty sure I saw a yellow-bellied sapsucker this afternoon back in the woods by the river. It might have been a young flicker, though. I’ve never seen a sapsucker around here & flickers are common. Our solitary wild turkey was back again, cleaning up under the feeder. I wonder if it’s a female with a [...]
Spicer Versus Berryman
Why does Jack Spicer get included in the post-avant canon, but not John Berryman? Both are metrical masters who dramatize the self in extremis. The inclusion / exclusion is political & cultural, not literary. The notion of the post-avant is just another version of a discredited identity politics.
Of course: I realize that Berryman worked from [...]
Last Class of the Semester
Lots of grading to do in the next few days, but classes are over. It was in some ways a tough semester — I missed a week early on because of illness & the particular combination of large writing-intensive classes meant I had too much student writing to respond to — but overall it was [...]
Fraud
It’s very touching that her colleagues & the students she worked with are saddened by the sudden resignation of Marilee Jones, the dean of Admissions at MIT & I suppose it means I’m a crass bastard who fails to see the larger tragedy, but the first thing I thought of when I read this was [...]
David Halberstam
The journalist David Halberstam died last night from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. He was 73. Halberstam, along with Neil Sheehan & a couple of others, reinvented American journalism under the historical pressure of the American War in Vietnam. What a terrible end to an astonishing career. Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest [...]
Clive James on Wittgenstein
I’ve read, or at least read at, the Tractatus; I’ve read the first third of Philosophical Investigations; Clive James captures in a few words the gist of the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. I particularly appreciate that James understands the role of silence in Wittgenstein’s view of the world. Language is so powerful within [...]
School of Quietude, Continued
I was critical of Ange Mlinko in this post in response to Tom Morgan’s thoughts about the so-called school of quietude in contemporary American poetry. But if her claim, in the letter Morgan quotes, that someone she knows graduated with an MFA in poetry from SW Texas State without knowing who John Ashbery is, mainstream [...]
Work to Do
Despite the perfect weather, I have a great deal of indoor work over the next couple of weeks. I haven’t done a bit of it this weekend — I keep wandering outside to look at the river, ro see which birds are at the feeder, to see which plants are sprouting, which flowers blooming, which [...]
More Birds & Others
Yesterday I saw our wild turkey again briefly. And at the feeder a couple of house finches & some American tree sparrows & mourning doves. There are gray squirrels, red squirrels, chipmunks, & the occasional mouse or vole caught out of the corner of the eye. This morning walking the dogs on the other side [...]
First Finch
I’m pretty sure I saw the first house finch today. It was over by the feeder in a spruce tree, but didn’t fly down to eat while I was looking. The weather has been awful these first three weeks of April (insert obligatory allusion to T.S. Eliot here), with low gray skies, freezing nights & [...]
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