The Golden Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl Sarah Ruhl, award winning playwright and member of the genius grant class (it’s a badge you can wear for life), has been the theme of my week. Her recently released book, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater, is […]

Working Along the Nerve

A scanning electron microscope image of a nerve ending. It has been broken open to reveal vesicles (orange and blue) containing chemicals used to pass messages in the nervous system. (Photo: Tina Carvalho) Sally Reed, friend and artist, left the following quote from Anne Truitt’s Daybook as a comment to the posting below. It is […]

Bishop/Lowell: Art, and Life

Courtesy of Vassar College Library A group of us are reading Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and their correspondence with each other. There are aspects of both of them—their sensibilities, quirks, proclivities, struggles, shared glimpses of the interior landscapes—that have taken on an ambience that feels like a permeating fragrance. The oddest details are […]

The World Might Change

It is Marvellous to Wake up Together It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof […]

Tribeswoman

May Swenson (1913-1989) was born in Logan Utah to a Swedish immigrant Mormon family, the eldest of ten children. After finishing college at Utah State University, she moved East, teaching at Bryn Mawr and several other universities. Well respected as a poet during her lifetime, she is known for her proclivity to closely align nature […]