Rereading Frankenstein
I’ve been rereading Frankenstein the last couple of days because I’m going to teach it in my Imagining Science course next term. I’ve taught the book before, but never well, I suspect because I never managed to enter into its imaginative universe until now. The book is a bundle of narrative implausibilities & the science, [...]
Rilke’s Birthday
There was a period in my life — my late thirties — when I poured obsessively over Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus & Duino Elegies. I even got a German dictionary & worked word-by-word through some of the sonnets. I collected different translations. Dana Gioia (now Commissar of the NEA, but then just an aparatchik on [...]
Throwing Newsweek Away
I got a subscription to Newsweek as an automatic premium when I contributed to my local public radio station. It has been going straight from my post office box to the trash for two years now, so I am way ahead of the game.
Breaking a Bad Habit
For the last year or so I have been reading the Inside Higher Ed website & contributing occasionally to the discussions, but I’m going to have to stop. Not just stop posting in the forums, but stop reading. It’s sad but necessary, like leaving behind a bar you once loved because it has been taken [...]
An Exemplary Lyric by Jane Cooper
The poet Jane Cooper died in October of this year after a long life in poetry. Her first book came out the year I graduated from high school, I think, but I didn’t become aware of her work until about ten years ago. She was a “poet’s poet,” one supposes, who won prizes but didn’t [...]
Not Sentimental?
Here’s another poem — John Crowe Ransom’s “Dead Boy” — I have loved a long time & though I now find Ransom’s celebration of the “dynastic” families of the Agrarian South pretty offensive, the language of this poem is not sentimental. Ransom does not ask the reader to produce an emotional response for which [...]
Reevaluating James Wright’s “A Blessing”
There is a poem in my second book that channels Wright’s voice so effectively that even someone who knew Wright’s work fairly well might mistake it for the real thing. James Wright’s poetry was once tremendously important to me, but these days, when I go back to it, the work feels sentimental to me. I’m [...]
Hesse as Individualist
Via Wood s Lot, this thought from Hermann Hesse:
My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honour. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or [...]
Doris Lessing
I don’t know Lessing’s work very well, but I remember being blown away by The Golden Notebook when I was in my twenties. I probably missed a lot of the message, but I was carried along by the sheer audacity of the thing. This piece in the Telegraph reminded me of a couple of other [...]
Contemporary Short Stories, Music, Poetry
I really enjoyed this essay by Jean Thompson responding to Stephen King’s (predictable) take-down of the “literary” short story. The same argument about “elitism” & “difficulty” has been made (endlessly) about contemporary poetry. Not directly related, perhaps, but I was reminded of my old friend Davy Rakowski’s remarks about writing contemporary music:
I write music. Concert [...]
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