Journals and Commonplace Books
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…
Category: Poets
Books Inspected This Afternoon
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:…
What Came First
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…
Paradise and Inferno
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…
With Gratitude for Rexroth
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…
Dylan’s Tweets
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…
Problematizing My Faves: A Conservative Remembers Allen Ginsberg
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…
Share the Wealth on Sunday 28 August: A Student, a Friend, a Teacher
“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…
Favorite Mary Oliver Poems
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention.Be astonished.Tell about it.–Mary Oliver, from “Sometimes” Laura …When I Am Among the Trees When I am among the trees,especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks…