The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’
Johnny Payne questions the idea of manifestos in poetry, preferring his own mantra: “Write poetry first with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind.”
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
Merion West arts editor Johnny Payne reflects on why Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” endures over the centuries as one of the finest works written in English.
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given t
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
“The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excrucia
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
“the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship”
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
“[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premis
“For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time”
“Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.”
“What kind of light flames on them? What’s on fire—/A church? A shop? But also inward: desire”
“[Elise] Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term ‘ethnopoetics,’ taking it outside the boundaries of ‘traditional societies,’ ‘the informant,’ and the outsider who goes in to record ‘pre-literate narratives.’”
“I envisioned myself old on a mountain hike/a soft breeze lifting my long white hair/I thought I’d live ‘til ninety-five”
“Sinister pinwheel/stuck to a breezeless sentence/as sly ornament—”
“I swore I heard willows cry/through the zig zagged fields,/traveling through my universe/as quickly as the moon touches our light”
“In [Erica] Reid’s Ghost Man on Second, the real ghost man floating through the pages is the sonnet.”
“The city never sleeps: the isle of faces illuminated by cell phones/is proof its waking isn’t rising, only beeping, only static,/only the cashier in the convenience store, only flickering.”
the gilded tree that glitters in dusklight/like an upside-down chandelier
“We thought there couldn’t be anything more./But hurricanes can collide with tornados, can join floods./Beautiful and horrific are the moment’s songs.”
“Bruises bloom roses; the blind bird has fled./Ocean quiet bedroom night light turned dim,/the sting of his fist purple on her skin.”
“Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined…”
“the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook”
“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”
“Seek mercy for eggs we scrambled in a youth/spent banging pots and pans together./For the telling of clumsy lies, our voices/cracking like pecans together.”
“How/it both is, and is not/a type of existence.”
“If a stranger comes around, if he’s wise, he will keep to the road and announce his business soon, clearly and loudly, then you’ll see what’s what. You’re not against him, but you’re not automatically for him.”
“In her exquisitely physical Rodeo, Sunni Brown Wilkinson takes her place among those superb modernists, early and late and post, who recognize the combination of mutability and continuity across poetic epochs that is a key to lyric’s continuing strength and relevance…”
“And then a tide of blood fell back in me/after that I walked with open ears/I found that the trees had voices, and/they sang like forgotten, sunless seas.”
“Night flower,/short-lived lover/of darkness,/offspring of cactus,/desert jewel/lulled awake/by moonbeams”
“Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt.”
“Doom is there staring, everywhere/I go, like a brazen coyote/dead center of the road/half-starved so it doesn’t care anymore.”
“The hand drops a fresh globe/into the scoured skull, secures breath upon/the hemispheric nostrils and stands back,/appraising…”
“As for most poets, [Valerie] Witte’s writing is intensely personal, whatever form it may take. No ‘experimental’ poet could be more candid and direct about her intention of ‘examining in a new way’ matters close to her heart.”
“Among a murder of mannequins/the guilty can’t be picked out of a lineup.”
“The woods sigh. And then, a thousand miles away,/I’m in your arms again. Your breathing is an ocean./I’m drifting away. You whisper.”
“There is a fervor that I do not surge with,/A saintliness with which I do not sing.”
“It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials.”
“Having just emerged from her tv and ac,/she was too sun-shocked and asphyxiating/to hear ‘it’s a lovely shoot’/as my spade severed the root.”
“I scatter the sandpipers who/run from me/but not/the tides.”
“As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”
“her body, between the buildings/behind her and the parked cars/in front, throwing a coal-black shadow/on the ground the color/of tarnished silver…”
“You had time to contemplate its masonry/and recall that other jail, the temple/of muscle and flesh built by your trade/of bricklayer, now turning wan and idle.”
“If I have become something of an expert reader of poems, it is in part because long ago, I learned to linger on the surface of things, rather than push past their specifics in order to arrive quickly at instant profundity.”
“The far shore wore a gauzy veil of rain./Dark thunderheads rose over Evian/and shook the silver surface of the lake,/ruffling like shot silk.”
“The tone of After Image is simultaneously calm and feverish, as the bereaved one moves along a spectrum from numb to utterly passionate, up and down, yet never hysterical, never heaping ashes on her head.”
“Cicadas, dirty oil, dogs, Venus, gloves/clouds, manholes, fled storms, black notes, harmonies/float indiscriminate as my head throbs/then disappear on the next wisp of breeze”
“While others cycled to dusty fields,/sported bats and mitts, shouted to claim/their favorite positions, I was alone,/my red Schwinn and me—no/deception of ritual, no useless chatter,/no bad calls, no vicarious parents.”
A poem by Nancy Byrne Ianucci.
“[Anne-Marie] Turza shows dramatic flair for summoning our attention, that of a town crier or carnival barker who was handed a surprise announcement at the last possible minute, and now must sell its premise before a skeptical gathered audience with all the bravado she can muster.”
“After supper,/God burps through his heartburn, eyes Gabriel/and—as expected—punishes: Two thousand years/hard labor for your antics, errand boy.”
“and I send her sunflowers on a sunny day./and I think of her children./and I sing with the Wailers.”
“What stands out in Nakanishi is that she possesses an acute awareness of the root poetic traditions of her native islands and brings them forward with respect while also being influenced, as she herself professes, by poets such as Californian Gary Snyder—whose verse, like hers, is thoroughly immers
“The Sistine Chapel hived billions/of microbes, moss piglets/throbbing on God’s finger, frescoes flooded/with bacteria, angels fruiting cocci.”
Beyond a life of seeing, saying, being, by sparest nudge or shimmer, I shall cease. I ask what for, the dying, what the living. I start recording. I collect and keep.
“[Amy] Beeder’s nimble adaptiveness and ability to key her lexicon to a wily set of speakers and dramatic personae in And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey are what make this rare book command attention.”
“Coughing, ululating, barking, whooping./Can he cough out the memory of a lonely/girl waiting, wanting, watching, waiting?”
“Wife of himself/she taught him how to be in this world/as all women teach. The woman in you/will teach you, man king,/how to be.”
“Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retre
“Ever human-centric/We self-aggrandized/Anthropomorphized/And now agonize.”
“Once the speaker’s psyche and voice are introduced via questions, the photo in a sense begins to dissolve, becoming secondary, important, vital in its own right, but not ultimately defining. Thus the fecund faithlessness of poetry.”
“The old man had paid dearly/he could still get lost in dreams”
“The bright green of summer wheat/with the brown of the ducks that stalk the fair/dykes where the raft spiders search for things to eat.”
“He feels himself watched/as he counts accents./He knows the painter’s/watching for the precise moment/when his blue ink freezes.”
“This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all.”
“In oncoming lights, my veins are dirty strings.”
“Every night/A lover be”
“In yellow night, the day refuses to give ground/and I prepare to wait out its siege. Soon you’ll/arrive, and together we’ll chant the Midnight/Sutra”
“The combination of dread and cheer these reveries bring about could accurately be called the optimist’s nightmare. The poet-speaker holds compassion as the stalk of a dandelion holds juice, hidden yet keeping the flower active and aloft through sheer tensile strength.”
“Held in palm,/a bloom of peony to/inspect.”
“A metaphysical compass, a refrain, an unyielding ethos in which to believe,/no longer reserved for near misses with the vehicular minions of the MTA,/I have come to regard existence as nothing more/than this pull between hesitation and action”
“Sharif’s style throughout Customs is neither bland nor baroque. It has the directness of what one overhears while waiting in line to cross on foot an international border or passing through immigration at an airport. It is a stylization of how people talk in such circumstances.”
“to my dog/Nate/as he is finishing/a seizure/i repeat/i am with you”
“Wire/protects the beech/from bladed lovers/initial-besotted for years,/each letter a small death.”
“Sigo is a poet of utter seriousness, one who feels strongly about justice, the revindication of Native American identity, the calling out of cruelty and neglect, and many other pressing social matters. But he comes at the task with a meditative indirection, insisting on approaching these realities
“Soon first responders make a grim/assessment of the odd catastrophe.”
“And it is all held together in an irrepressible delight in language and what happens when language and imagination are unleashed and told to have a good time.”
“Then you arrived like fresh tulips in winter,/the shape of my heart, the color of gold;/you turned the weeds in my garden into roses,/every rock on my farm was a bar of chocolate/waiting to feed our future generations…”
“Here reposes the reverie-inducing freedom of Rilke and Proust, where you get to say ‘dreaming’ twice, or a thousand times, and even ‘et cetera’ twice, in case you forgot to fill in the blank with your own lyrical, rapture-adjacent images the first time.”
“I scan rooms with a happiness detector,/which is like a broken Geiger counter/that stays silent while the bombs go off.”
“Age isn’t just a number, as we’d heard/it’s how we get here. I’m twice my daughter’s age/and neither thought we’d haul ourselves this far.”
“In invoking (and sometimes tweaking) cherished predecessors, this gently impious collection also helps refurbish form.”
“I have/a secret pigeon in my heart./I keep it in a cage composed of object lessons and feed it/moral law.”
“Lost in the Woods is a symptom/of heart’s sudden loss/of direction registered in small/persistent cramps and little gasps.”
“Night’s ink congeals on rice, coating peas/like black sea pebbles glistening in the harrowed/moonlight staring through the shattered kitchen window.”
“In shallow ripples bathing together in pairs, as may be seen by the deep, clear waters of Xiangjiang.”
“The lines, like long, rolling ocean waves on a cold Baltic sea, create their own reasons, their own rhythm, their own understanding. Anaphora is used, as Whitman did, to summon us to the great historical pageant of life, of happenings beyond our immediate knowledge.”
“Nonetheless, a worm/had eaten its way through any number/of Gabriel’s lines, some of his best./He had to reconstruct them from memory,/or compose them anew.”
“Whether [Jenny] Xie’s volume was long in the making or came out in a fiery burst (maybe both, by parts?), it is a work of substance, worthy of its current high reputation.”
“On its dead claws and back, mottled and plain,/from a long beach whose gulls roost on an edge,/Inscrutable.”
“Why does she ask forgiveness?/For what and from whom?/Why does she call herself/a mountain tiger?”
“Edgar Kunz, the author of Tap Out and Fixer, does not refer to himself specifically as blue collar, proletarian, or working class. Well-meaning others, such as mentor Edward Hirsch, do so, referring to Tap Out as ‘gutsy, tough-minded, working-class poems of memory and initiation.’”
“Examining for mixed motives the flaws/That turned their city-cousins ash-/Grey. She labels one Snow-in-Ghana,/As though she doesn’t trust her own desire.”
“I am alive and you’re alive, and hope exists,/but I have to bid farewell to these words of mine,/which I will never shout, because I’m but a man. “
“Whatever one may say about the People’s Republic of China today, it once offered the model of the poet-emperor, as well as poets employed in political life, wedding governance to lyric spirit.”
“And working together, what might we become?/citizens of a single kingdom./you could find it all in the palm of your hand/alongside Indian, yellow and black.”
“I sometimes think I don’t belong here/in this wood–that the tree’s knots/are frowns grown for me, or the leaf crunch/is a worm cracking a crass joke at my expense.”
“Here on a narrow one-lane/overgrown with cattails and ivy/the circle of turkey buzzards draws closer.”
“By that token, perhaps Bianca Stone is just the poet for our times. Her verses wrestle with a dirty angel, one that bites and kicks. There is no snow-white falcon in her pages. But she does not quit.”
“In the actual, from which another life/Is straining to burst, to set out in navigation,/Or be swallowed by demons in the leaves.”
“So many stars and mountains, crests and sky,/Are we not fools to think that we can know/What underlies such intricate designs?”
“The Dream Apartment is no Barbie’s Dream House. It is rather an abode of opaque and backlit, sometimes hard-edged reverie.”
“My mad uncle had the Burma jungle/In his head—burnt-out tracts of history/He’d stalk in ambush of his sanity”
“Doubt/Never stunned the marrow in their bones/Who rose above the merely physical,/And if they faltered, it was only once—”
“Insects fall silent amid the sedge and cranes grow restive in the treetops,/Sensing this busy world no longer cares for the sentiments of old.”
“You returned to Rome Augustus triumphant./King of defeated nation I trailed behind./To this day the senators can’t tell/which of the two wore the wreath.”
“I said a silent prayer, asking for the strength to get through another day of being incarcerated, and climbed down from my steel bunk, ready to navigate the gossip, fighting, and ordinary drama that come with prison life.”
“Every object, rests on its certain devaluation/In the implacable fact of an ending—decay,/Dissolution, death—from which another/New thing and its solicitation emerges.”
“The hyper-masculine environment of a prison creates additional impediments. Inmates fear that any sign of weakness might lead another inmate to take advantage, another reason not to speak openly with others. Sexual abuse is at the top of the list of things prisoners will not talk about.”
“Allow me to be unambiguous: I am no one’s BIPOC mannequin. I am a person foremost and not a skin color, and I will not be cheapened nor reduced. I am not marginalized, and I need no special treatment. I refuse your categories.”
“It had taken an earthquake for me to see Ceausescu greed as it really was, and I knew how bad these excesses would look to my countrymen.”
“‘Sometimes all a man needs is a horizon/in which to vanish,’ I thought.”
“Or was it the Living God/Who did do this,/And not Hosea?”
“What magnificent coordination. A ballet/on wheels. Impossible, but there it was/day after rainy day, not one collision.”
“Avoiding these truly current, red hot issues, the women speak past each other.”
“On the basis of viscerality alone, Gran Turismo is worth the price of admission for the two-hour cruise along.”
“We must take the language/by surprise;/seal its every utterance/with a kiss or tear…”
“Sometimes—in the middle of fair night—/when disobedient moon turns vandal/and violently rips off the bolts/of my window-shutters, my eyelids…”
“No thought, as that of mine, to complete the bare/Purpose of their being, which is to feed and breed,/Become another edible, leave another seed.”
“I cannot argue with his characterization of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes as a ‘triumvirate of stooges,’ but with me, he is preaching to the choir. How will he convince the postmodernists?”
“The more these women agreed to be shamed for their ‘whiteness,’ the more I wondered why doing so made them feel ethical. Feeling shame makes nobody ethical. Just uncomfortable.”
“As he reaches the century mark, Elias Victor Seixas Jr. deserves our respect and gratitude for leading a long and extraordinary life.”
“If reading is about a relationship with a text, then my subsequent readings represented different relationships. As I changed, the book changed. I was a different person reading a different book. I am not even sure it is accurate to call this rereading.”
“Amid this exchange about the importance of recentering the essential literature of our history, I posed to Mac Donald a question that has been on my mind since my days as a student at The Haverford School: Should one make a habit of reading the same book twice?”
“And because you are beautiful do not think/The Nereids will hear you, or Neptune wake/And the sea calm, and you will not sink”
“And where, but in constant circularity/Is all this moving headed?/The answer Cannot be death…”
“My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending…”
“‘Where now security, what to trust?’/The cycle of an invisible moon has/Our harbor in its force, another period/Has begun: the existing limits to be tested.”
“Yet there is no one thing, no attribute/Of yours that I can fix on, nothing/I can abstract, describe, isolate…”
“They do not realize good mothering comes from fearlessness. Few things promote more fear than being deprived of control of one’s own body.”
“‘What have you got there?’ ‘It’s snapper.’/“Did you catch it?’ ‘No, my dad caught it—/He says to watch out for any tiny bones.’”
“Not everything stays the same, and, in many cases, it probably should not.”
“Many of us also like impostors because, deep down, we understand that to exist only matter-of-factly, without fiction, would be intolerable.”
“But the price of that fame and quasi-divine status took its toll. ‘Immortality had its costs,’ Porter writes, ‘and Homer paid for it dearly.’”
“Anyone who keeps/A compost heap knows the whole of life”
“And that we might as well stop killing one another,/because everyone who lived during the French Revolution is dead anyways.”
“In that waltz, you find me now/Singing, dancing, with the moon”
“and Pastor speaks with God, while I/repent my youth that/like the flower which fades/has been my secret, golden calf.”
“What does it bring to light?/What meaning is there to land?/Have you killed a bit of me? I doubt it.”
“They’ve always been rivals with a town across the county line, a town of insulation and roofing makers. It’s a working-class rivalry, the authentic kind, one that lasts whatever color the collars become.”
“Freeman’s book, as the author acknowledges, is written as something of a eulogy to this great man of antiquity, who has captured imaginations for two millennia.”
“The silver lining is/you won’t be catching planes/to drag yourself away”
The light coming out of the street lamps, how it reaches out over the narrow little bit of beach, toward the water. The beach that’s made more of pebbles than sand, the pebbles that hurt your feet when you walked on them when the weather was warm enough to
“Almost all the key events of modern Europe were seen through the eyes of this painting, which Collinsworth vividly brings to life in her writing.”
“This is a story about the meek inheriting the Earth.”
“All those routines!/And unhappiness can be alike.”
“We should also be kind while we may.”
“More truths than cancer creep beneath our speech.”
“Much like the United States itself, the story of Yellowstone is one of tragedy and hope, defiance and cut-throat ambition, beauty and terror, charity and callousness.”
“One of the spiritual overtones present in Father Stu is one important to Christian teaching: the merit of suffering. The Christ-like endurance of suffering is particularly embodied in Long himself.”
“They bring us here, to a place/Elsewhere, where there is no motion”
“Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.”
“Athens: City of Wisdom is a tour through over 3,000 years of the history of a city that has such imaginative sway and spiritual power over the hearts and minds of so many people around the world today.”
It has been 50 years since The Godfather was widely released in the United States on March 24, 1972.
“In this rousing story, [Roosevelt] Montás concentrates on four particular ‘great authors’ that embody and encapsulate the human condition who shaped him: Saint Augustine, Plato, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi.”
“The citruses will still bear fruit, and if not these,/There will be others to form the soft flesh/Of oranges, new limes: all creating in their rot.”
“Love is the central theme of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy. It is from love that new life begins. It is in love that life is sustained and made pleasant.”
“His culminating chapter is a love letter from his heart of his life spent in literature, his life as it matured for himself, and he has given himself and his favorite books to us to discover afresh and anew.”
“Yet the cold does not rest there.”
“However, in his uncompleted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow, as well as The Silmarillion, Tolkien presented a different vision of human nature, one that is more realistic and more concomitant with his Catholic upbringing.”
“Odysseus has before him the fantastical dream of every man: immortality and sex. He ultimately gives that up for mortality with his family.”
“Because there’s little more to friendship than warding off scurvy or having a catch.”
“Such politicized readings of the last 50 years miss the profundity of Ovid’s inclusion of the story in his grander poetic agenda of love being the constant star in the midst of a world of violence and transformation.”
“But the one fight that never resolved was the one between my Bessarabian grandfather and my American Uncle Izzie, who drove a truck and married into the family long before I was born. And it happened during the late 1970s, during the Carter administration.”
“Thinking leads to Hell. The way is wide…”
“Sayles’s 1996 film, Lone Star, is arguably his greatest work to date. And after 25 years, given the tensions that continue to circle around issues of race and immigration, it certainly has not lost any of its original force and relevance.”
“Young Americans, myself included, need to resist the impulses of the day and keep striving. We may never be Bond types, but the quest for self-improvement is the point. To strive is to live.”
“One hundred years after Fitzgerald’s great novels, we are living in the same world as Nick Carraway, Amory Blaine, and Jay Gatsby.”
“Although I would have liked to have taken a photograph, my camera was full, and they’d already walked away toward a shop with a sign advertising Calzones.”
“In many ways, the book also reads as a eulogy to a liberal, liberalizing, and internationalist America.”
“Why, after all, should it be ‘pro-test,’ and not ‘de-test’? Protest once meant to give testimony in pro of something good, over and against something corrupt.”
“Scruton loved Wagner. The two were a match made in heaven, or hell, depending on your perspective and appreciation of irony.”
“For a young immigrant boy who knew nothing about politics or history, Star Wars had a universal appeal that transcended language, nationality, time, and other superficial social barriers.”
“Channeling Uncle Bill, who died over a decade ago, I invite his ghost to weigh in. But rather than answering, he walks me downstairs in his old Brooklyn house, where we stand together in his paneled den—the perfect skin we’d heard about, now on the floor.”
“Two millennia later, we are still warring over the meaning of Virgil’s Aeneid.”
“Odysseus is the first recognizably Western man.”
“This is not a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, especially when enemies could come from within as well as without. Rather…it is a war between one good and another.”
“Dad never searched for buried treasure again. He instead bought lottery tickets, entered contests online, and invested in a million dinar after Iraq fell…”
“In the end, these are movies about redemption and what it means to be redeemed, whatever the struggle in getting there.”
“By sheer accident, one man in this stupefied future learns how to read.”
“It is a short and gripping panorama of life in 1920s-1940s America, that defining epoch of struggle and stardom, hardship and grandeur, fortune and bankruptcy—and Bugsy Siegel experienced it all.”
“The statistics were/like our scores—and we wanted/to lead the boards…”
“How to describe it all? My dad and his sweaty armpits and the black garbage bags with the slice of old-time America buried inside. This sadness I’ve become filled with, which doesn’t feel like the kind of sadness the artist intended, but the opposite…his sadness looks like happiness to me.”
“In the meantime, fans have discussed and debated the merits of Bond himself. Is the character a good person? Is he a positive role model for today’s youth?”
“The problem is that this story of Mozart that we think we know is not true at all; thankfully, Jan Swafford is here to correct the problem.”
“In a novel to be released later this month, Hornblum—perhaps best known for his 1998 non-fiction book Acres of Skin, which centers on different events at Holmesburg Prison—retells the calamitous events of August, 1938.”
“Both Ortega and Orwell concluded that the Left was in trouble as a result of these developments, and their analyses and diagnoses pointed the way forward to the situation we have today in the West.”
“While not all of his essays are explicitly moral in orientation, nearly all of Plutarch’s essays have moral instruction and guidance baked into them.”
“Having lived in Latvia for over a year…there is a selection of good things, ideas or their manifestations, which seem to pervade Latvia and/or which the United States either lacks or has forgotten.”
“While many have suffered badly—and I do feel their anguish over being fired, falling into depression, or even committing suicide—I have to admit that it turned out rather nicely for me.”
“As McDowell suggests, it was the liberating and open environment of humanist education that moved Milton more than any theological or political zeal, and it seized Milton at an early age.”
“Those who are adamant that love will trump hate, heal the world, and divinize us are not articulating anything new. The Greeks are still singing to us the songs of humanistic love as the spirit that will heal the world.”
“On December 21, 1945—75 years ago today—in the stillness of his waning moments in a German military hospital, General George S. Patton Jr. pondered his life.”
“Vance’s critics could benefit from a basic overview of the difference between a primary and secondary source, and between the personal and the systemic.”
“Therefore, in the spirit of diversity and exploration, I have compiled a list of what I see as the ten best novels on modern British identity, to remind us that British identity is not exhausted by the referendum divides…”
“Lying Bastard is a work of the zeitgeist. Disgruntled intellectuals. Returning war veterans just beginning their higher education. A school shooting. The fraud of academicians. Societal exploitation.”
“Saying that people need to know the objective truth about what goes on Up There, the objective truth about evil places fueled by imported wine and blank consciences.”
“The ultimate message it proffers—Ubik the substance, Ubik the book—is one of self-determination despite humanity’s manifest lack of control and certainty.”
“What is a classic? What is an epic? These two questions loom over any reader of Gone with the Wind (and great literature, more generally).”
“Reading it specifically in the context of the current societal struggles and apparently widespread cultural conflicts occurring in the United States today, the myth imbues the reader with a redoubled vigilance.”
“On fences and poles were the signs and posters of the age. Men with hard eyes and stiff lips; men with mustaches and military hats; women in dresses, sleeves rolled, forearms flexed. The age the man knew not.”
“Just as it was in Shakespeare’s time, the questions of justice, mercy, and society remain as relevant as ever before, and we have much to learn from the great bard of Anglodom.”
“For all the battle scenes, violent sex, and rage that fills the poem, the most memorable scenes in the poem are moments of love—especially loving moments of embrace.”
“This is an art which no longer presumes to speak to or for the general public. Such an art “assails all previous art” and even “ridicules art itself.”
“But, as I found myself stumbling in my response to my sister, a more elemental question arose: Can we read Moby Dick?”
“Aeschylus’ tragedy represents the most elemental aspects of our human condition: all human flourishing comes with a cost.”
In the words of German poet Henrich Heine: “There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.”
“But Aeschylus’ cosmos goes beyond Homer’s in presenting Reason, Persuasion, as an integral aspect of the cosmos that was otherwise absent in Homer.”
“Any civilization or culture is itself a vast dynamic interpretation or, we could even say, a vast dynamic work of art.”
