Dear 1L
You’re sitting in Civ Pro— Looking like you’re paying attention Masking skillfully Your ho-hum ennui Let me remind you— In your deep heart’s core You can always visit Innisfree Or even chat with Crazy Jane
Category: World Literature
This Makes Me Think of Kathy Kelly
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are…
Calming the Breath by Ko Un
Poised like an aging bear climbing a tree, hanging on tightly, I collect my breath. Poised like a bird stretching its neck out and pecking at food I collect my breath. Heaven and earth are…
After Reading Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life
July 2005 It was one month ago that I began to read Whitman in earnest, and, while I still have far to go in prose and poetry, an impression has been made, a fire has…
Share the Wealth with Te Martin: The Wisdom of Silence, Pilgrimage, and a Compost Pile– Reflections on Summer
Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come,…
On Ginsberg’s HOWL
It was a cri de coeur, an alarm, a vision. Its structure matched its energy which seemed the voices of many, not one. It was a rhizomic collage, just like life, a pastiche of the…
Face to Face with Elie Wiesel
This short review was originally published in the bulletin of the Center for Ethics and Social Policy in Berkeley, April 1993. My book, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, was published in spring 2001….
A Nation of Words
Miriam Weinstein’s Yiddish: A Nation of Words is a compelling book. Go to Amazon.com and type in “Yiddish” and many books will come up whose titles are cheap, sentimental, ridiculous, goofy. Weinstein has a sense…
Poetry Lover
I’ve read it every day of my life since I was thirteen. It is, among the man-made artifacts, my primary source of knowledge of the stuff of this world and the next. Its limitless archive…
The Last Sentence of Middlemarch
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number…