One of the reasons I get rather depressed by the current fad for documentary style fiction, is its insistence on the explanatory above the symbolic. Good writing goes beyond its subject matter. Language is more than meaning. The things that we have read that we remember seem to move with us through our lives as […]
Poetry
A Landscape I Know
Distance From up here, the insomniac river turning in its bed looks like a line somebody painted so many years ago it’s hard to believe it was ever liquid; a motorboat winks in the sun and leaves a wake that seals itself in an instant, like the crack in a hardly broken heart. And the […]
Waiting for the Crack
Spring Thaw in South Hadley Old snows locked under glass by last night’s ice storm left curatorial Winter, in whose hands alone we’d hope to find the keys, jangling them in the trees—. not merely in these pine needles by the fistful gloved in crystal, but, from their boughs, the self- invented digits of icicles […]
The Many Worlds View
I’m off to New York for a few days. I want to see the Mannerist drawing show at the Morgan Library, most particularly out of respect for my daughter Kellin who is a Mannerista fanatic now that she is living in Florence. (To read an excerpt from the New York Times review of this show, […]
Elizabeth Bishop’s Last Poem
Sonnet Caught — the bubble in the spirit level, a creature divided; and the compass needle wobbling and wavering, undecided. Freed — the broken thermometer’s mercury running away; and the rainbow-bird from the narrow bevel of the empty mirror, flying wherever it feels like, gay! Elizabeth Bishop And if you are so inclined, here is […]
Inexhaustible, Mysterious Genius: Elizabeth Bishop
The Library of America has just released a new volume on Elizabeth Bishop. I have several others from the LOA series and find the quaintness of these publications comforting–the smaller size, the simple glossy black cover, the onionskin-thin paper, the bookmark cord supplied for you to employ immediately at your favorite spot. Having this carefully […]
The Shape of Her Soul is a Square
She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul (Mrs. Morninghouse, after a Sermon Entitled, “What the Spirit Teaches Us through Grief”) The shape of her soul is a square. She knows this to be the case because she sometimes feels its corners pressing sharp against the bone just under her shoulder blades and across the wings […]
From the Center of My Life Came a Great Fountain
The Wild Iris At the end of my suffering there was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was […]
Living in the Layers
The Layers I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see […]
Jason Moran and The Bandwagon: Milestone
Tarus Mateen, Nasheet Waits, Jason Moran (Bandwagon) In the “Earth stood still for a minute. Seriously dude, it did” category: My son Bryce came with me on a 2 hour pilgrimage from Boston to Hanover, New Hampshire–Dartmouth College–on Thursday night to hear and see Jason Moran perform with The Bandwagon (Tarus Mateen on bass, Nasheet […]