Come A Little Bit Closer Now Baby: Philip Larkin’s “Church Going”
“Church Going” is an atheist’s poem, an ironic atheist’s poem, and a very good one.
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Come A Little Bit Closer Now Baby: Longfellow’s “Snow-Flakes”
Habit of mind: when I walk or snowshoe in the falling snow, or watch it descend from inside, lines from snow poems I love come to me. Inevitably, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Snowstorm”––first line tells us, the storm is “Announced by all the trumpets of the sky”.
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AWP, For the Very First Time
In just a couple of weeks, thousands from the literary world will descend upon hotels, bookstores, and eateries in Washington, D.C. for the annual conference of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
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Top 40 Sweet Cheeks: Cee-Lo, Gwyneth, Dap-dippin’ & the Motown Legacy
To the extent that music was part of my childhood, I grew up predominantly on a mismatched diet of twelfth-century lute music (mom’s) and dueling banjos (dad’s).
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Come A Little Bit Closer Now Baby: Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones”
In early winter, the grass in North America still retains a cast of its autumn green, but after a few nights of deep freeze have killed the last of the ticks and fleas, the green turns greenish-grey. It’s then I begin remembering Thomas Hardy’s moving, highly-compressed and resonant sixteen-liner, “Neutral Tones.”
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Mere Sensibilities
Reading a writer’s posthumous diary is a guilty undertaking—absorbing words I was never meant to see, glimpsing the private corners of a mind I was never meant to explore.
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Book on Planes
We have all participated in the discussion about the new ways of reading, the end of the book, the new literacy, etc., etc., ad infinitum. And things are certainly changing.
As Beautiful as the Chance Encounter of a Coffee Mug and a Coaster on a Coffee Table
Headlines cycling. War, officially-forgotten diseases, hot-shot bailouts, shameless status updating, neglected continents, orchestral indie pop grandeur, absurd year-end best-of lists.
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Video Killed the Radio Star OMG WTF LOL, or Reflections of a Conflicted Facebook User
I was a longtime cell phone holdout. Even while living in Silicon Valley (or perhaps because of its fast-paced, ever-wired atmosphere), I loathed the idea of becoming “one of those people.”
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The Poetry Reading in Real Life
Since I’ve been doing a lot of readings lately, I’ve been thinking about the Poetry Reading as an antidote to the Internet.
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