Countless former prisoners described how memorized verse consoled them. It preserved their past life and their continuity with it. And it was something the authorities could not take away. Once stories about prisoners reciting poetry…
It was becoming a habit with [Thoreau] now to work back over his journals and to reread books, to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier…
Arthur Waley, Confucius: Analects Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems and Translations Ai Weiwei and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ai Weiwei Speaks David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Tu Fu Ezra Pound, Confucius:…
I was reading C.K. Williams’s book On WhitmanSeptember 2010And I scribbled on page 97 these three.. A NameAn AvowalA Maxim– Kelly McBride“You Are My Hero”Seven times down, eight times up The “Hero” referenceI’d first scribbled…
The World War I poet Ivor Gurney wrote: “There are strange Hells within the minds War made.” If a new Vietnam War poem is ever written in America, it will be a descent into that…
Kenneth Rexroth, 100 Poems from the JapaneseNew Directions, 1964 Dear EJ Kenneth Rexroth—poet, polymath, anarchist, and pacifist—is a fine guide to Chinese and Japanese poetry. He provided six books of translation for the enrichment of…
Yesterday I had lunch and spent some time with Andrew Ivers, a gentleman and a scholar, at Courtesy Diner on Hampton. Of course, we eventually came around to Bob Dylan, after Andrew gave me a…
Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer In a recent post, I acknowledged finally paying closer attention to the second precept of Thich…
“Appreciation is the sacrament.”—Allen Ginsberg Year after year, my understanding of “wealth” expands. I’ve been hosting these events for 10 years now, and it’s only today that it occurred to me to address the crucial…