What Is Vaster
In the early 1980s Harold Bloom noted about his experience of decades at Yale University that “[t]here is a profound falling away from what I would call ‘text-centeredness” among the current generation of American undergraduates,…
Category: World Literature
Minutes & Plans & Moons
I first came to the work of Charles Reznikoff in 2008 when I read his terse “poems” in Holocaust. He had read thousands of pages of war crimes trials transcripts to produce condensed, jarring, essential…
Bob Dylan Approximately: Summer 2019 Course
“That’s all we did in those days. Writing in the back seat of cars and writing songs on street corners or on porch swings, seeking out the explosive areas of life.” —Bob Dylan, 1977 “I…
Arousing Enthusiasm: Allen the Talker
for Laura Lapinski, who makes me laugh while lunching at Medina Grill, walking around the CWE, and hanging out in Left Bank Books There’s 15 to 20 Allen Ginsberg poems I’ve loved, and shared with…
The Irresistible Power of Natural Powers
Having recently perused Jim Forest’s biography and memoir of Dan Berrigan (Playing in the Lions’ Den), I returned to Berrigan’s collection of poems, And the Risen Bread. If I can find five poems in such…
Beautiful and Toxic Multitudes
Jewish because reading Dostoyevsky at 13 I write poems at restaurant tables Lower East Side, perfect delicatessen intellectual –Allen Ginsberg, Yiddishe Kopf Prompted by a recent tragedy, I turned again to the conclusion of Fyodor…
“Life Must Be Serious or It Can Go to the Devil”
Naguib Mahfouz, Mirrors [Al-Maraya] Illustrated by Seif Wanli Translated by Roger Allen —March 2005 What an odd book! It can be a goad to do something experimental in the future. It is a series of…
Share the Wealth with Maggie Needham: From Treating Harry Potter as Sacred to Treating Each Other as Sacred
Last January, I started a discussion group based on one of my favorite podcasts, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. This January, I was hired on by the podcast to help manage dozens of local…
We, Unsubsidized and Unbridled
And it is my firm conviction that a man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many. Language is…
Five Poems, Five Passages
Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann, ed. From Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry New Directions, 1964 Guido Calvacanti, Sonnet 7 Saint Teresa d’Avila, Bookmark Elizabeth I, When I Was Fair and Young William Butler…