How Refreshing!
Unlike critics and “language” poets, I have no agenda at all: I read books. –Eliot Weinberger, Written Reaction: Poetics, Politics, Polemics
Category: Reading
Liz, Here’s Another Work to Add to the Wisdom Literature List
But the whole teaching, the “way” contained in these anecdotes, poems, and meditations, is characteristic of a certain mentality found everywhere in the world, a certain taste for simplicity, for humility, self-effacement, silence, and in…
The Good News of Giving and Receiving Books, 6.26.2017
Ten years ago, because of a Social Justice theology class, I got to know Melissa Banerjee, a Bengali-American. It made sense to me to give her a hardback edition of the The Gospel of Sri…
Cultivating Avidity
Books of poetry will teach you more than your mentor or professor or the well-known poet you have traveled to a conference to work with. Reading is like food to a writer; without it, the…
Reading Leads to Writing
1. Yesterday I was rereading Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations, which I first read in 2013, and came across this page with my scribbles: 2. In Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, these scribbles became…
The Good News of Rereading, 4.2.2017
Tasha Rutledge and I had class together when she was a freshman at SLU in 2007. We read The Book of Mev in that class, and many years later she told me she reads it…
Books
I’m discussing Svetlana’s Alexievich’s Secondhand Time with Lori Hirst and Helen Houlle later today. One of the fascinating threads in this oral history is the emphasis on books in Soviet culture… My mother wasn’t alone,…
Books
I’m discussing Svetlana’s Alexievich’s Secondhand Time with Lori Hirst and Helen Houlle later today. One of the fascinating threads in this oral history is the emphasis on books in Soviet culture… My mother wasn’t alone,…
A Writer and His Readers
And nothing would make me happier than having made it possible for some of my readers to recognize their own experiences, difficulties, questionings, sufferings, and so on, in mine, and to draw from that realistic…
Libraries
A big library really has the gift of tongues and vast potencies of telepathic communication. Northrop Frye