Arts & Culture

“To Dig In and Endure”: Remembering Philip Levine, 1928-2015

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Indeed, in light of economic downturns leading to greater divides between the privileged and working classes, Levine’s poetry only seems to increase in relevancy. Never has there been more urgency for, as Edward Hirsch noted in his essay “Naming the Lost: The Poetry of Philip Levine,” poetry that reflects “the stubborn will of the dispossessed to dig in and endure.”

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Sonya Clark—Coiffed, Tangled: “The Hair Craft Project”

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“Hairdressers are my heroes. The poetry and politics of Black hair care specialists are central to my work as an artist and educator. Rooted in a rich legacy, their hands embody an ability to map a head with a comb and manipulate the fiber we grow into complex form. These artists have mastered a craft impossible for me to take for granted.”

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Small Talk

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Writerly small talk is no less terrible than all other kinds of small talk. I expect that the coffee table or cocktail conversations of botanists, estheticians, and Sunday school teachers all have their own fallback question, their own version of a polite follow-up after the “How are you’s” have been exchanged.

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Reading Badly

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When I look around the room, I still see small acts of resistance, even liberation. There are a number of young female scientists in the class; they are preparing for year-long research projects on the habits of a particular freshwater fish, or developing a process related to the physical properties of gold. By definition, as female scientists, they are in the statistical minority. At some point, each said yes to science when most of society pointed them toward no. What moment of learning gave them that strength? They are not alone; there are other moments in which learning, or just reading, provide stability or connection. A young man in the class tells us about reading Harry Potter to his father over the phone after his parents’ divorce. “I am trying to save my life,” Sherman Alexie writes, in regards to his reading. He’s not the only one.

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Car Haunt

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by Elizabeth Dickey

In 2012, Tom and Ray Magliozzi—also known as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers—stopped recording new episodes of Car Talk. But by recording things, the past can play forever on loop, its actions or words unfurling as though for the first time, even when they are well past their original expiration dates.

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