Long Live Vivacity!
Depend upon it, Sir, vivacity is much an art, and depends greatly on habit.—Samuel Johnson, in A Johnson Sampler, edited by Henry Darcy Curwen. I’ve never thought about vivacity in this way …To master an…
Tag: Ernesto Cardenal
When Life Starts to Improve
Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited by Charles E. Moore Prophetic witness consists of human deeds of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. It calls attention to the…
Ho-hum
William Carlos Williams/Selected Poems New Directions, 1968 See Also Reznikoff, Complete Poems; Thursday 26 May 2011 Someone please tell me the big deal about WCW, I’m halfway through this book and am not astounded, inspired,…
Mentshes/3
What You Understand Depends on Where You Stand For Brent Fernandez and Brett Schrewe Night Flight to Hanoi is an account of Jesuit Daniel Berrigan’s odyssey in late January and early February 1968, when…
Remembrancers
Just Another Night at Café Illumination After the talk on Operation Cast LeadCarla Nguyen and I headed over to Café IlluminationWhere we began processing what we heard We sat outside as it was a balmy…
Morning and Night
After finishing Hilberg’s trilogy this morning, have spent the evening with the poets: Eluard, Cardenal, Heifetz-Tussman, Glatshteyn, and Brecht.
Two Ways of Looking at a Plague…
Ernesto Cardenal, Zero Hour And Other Documentary Poems New Directions, 1980 Dear Chase & Liz, The Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal died on March 1. I’m going back over his works this spring under quarantine. I…
There and Then, Here and Now
A lady: Yes, that’s just like what goes on nowadays, and it’s because anyone that is struggling for the liberation of the oppressed, he himself is a Christ, and then here’s a Herod, and what…
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…
Where the Tortured and the Torturer Shook Hands
How many of our most famous novelists, for instance, have bothered to take the two-and-a-half hour flight from Miami and see for themselves what’s going on here? —Lawrence Ferlinghetti I first read Seven Days…