And Your Point Is?
Note: Originally posted on 2.8.2009, I’ve moved this back to the top because Robert Bernard Hass has been kind enough to respond in comments. I have also written a response to his comment and would love to hear the view of others, which is why I’m also going to cross-post this to the Plumbline blog.
What [...]
Hiding the Truth
I’ve been generally pleased with the progressive policies advanced by the Obama administration, but this really pushes my buttons. I said just before and then again just after the election that the birght line standard by which I would judge Obama consisted of his actions regarding torture and wiretapping. Everything the administration has said and [...]
Wish I’d Been There
Leonard Cohen gave his first US concert in 15 years the other night down in New York. I don’t really go to concerts any more, but this is one I’d have tried to go to if I had been just a bit closer. (Cohen will be up this way, in Ottawa in late May, but [...]
Why Study the Humanities?
There’s a piece in the NY Times this morning about the crisis in the Humanities. Why study the Humanities? Because, without a nuanced access to your own language and history, you wind up talking like George W. Bush and Bobby Jindal. And when you have only limited access to your own language and history, you [...]
Reveille for Two Poets by George De Grgorio
This would have made an excellent inauguration poem.
Twanging the Plumbline
As noted in a couple of previous posts, I have been participating in a discussion of poetics initiated by Henry Gould at a new blog, The Plumbline School, cross-posting a few of my comments here as well when they seemed detachable from their Plumbline context. There are, at last count, four participants in the project, [...]
Officially Tired of Winter
Yesterday morning as we were walking out to the car I announced to all and sundry (Carole) that I was Now Officially Sick and Tired of Winter. Then it started snowing and it hasn’t stopped. I’d write more but I have to go shovel the driveway.
Feel the Pain
Matthew Yglesias feels the pain of the bankers.
Hippies, Fascists, and a State of Play
Years ago, walking across a beautiful wooded college campus in the Northwest, I had a conversation with a friend about Yeats’ notions of will and imagination. My friend suggested that imagination was a middle term and that will represented one extreme, which left us missing a term. (This was long enough ago that one might [...]
Dream, Prayer, Chart
I’m still getting my bearings in this discussion so I’m going to indulge in just a bit more terminological meandering before I get down to looking at some actual poems.
In Kenneth Burke’s The Philosophy of Literary Form, there is an otherwise unremarkable essay on using Freud as a guide to interpreting poetry, in which Burke [...]
