The Endless Vitality of "Ode to the West Wind"
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.
Arts
A collection of 229 issues
At Woodlawn
Three Haiku
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
The Discarded
“A pair of discarded headstones/Lay in the wild weeds:/Cracked, faded, apart, lost”
Villanelle for Stronghold Table and Daydream
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
Indigo Goodbyes
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
Fieldnotes: Annie Christain’s “The Vanguards of Holography” and Caroline Harper New’s “A History of Half-Birds”
“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
The Ficus Frost
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
Melodic Dream of Attic
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
A Chapel
“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.”
Strawberry Fields Forever: Amie Whittemore’s “Nest of Matches”
“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 Incorporated Town and Cold War Clocks
“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.”
Public Education
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
Daisy Chain
“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”
Cosmic Comic Kvetching in Anthony Immergluck’s “The Worried Well”
“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
Overpass to Memphis
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
The Bells, on Evening Paths
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
Perfect Paradox
“the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship”
The Worst of Our Fathers
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
My Best Friend’s Sugar Daddy
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
Midwestern Mice in Silk Kimonos: Yuki Tanaka’s “Chronicle of Drifting”
“[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
Miscalculated
“For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time”
Observance, 2022
“Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.”
Saints
“What kind of light flames on them? What’s on fire—/A church? A shop? But also inward: desire”
Language for Throat and Tongue: Elise Paschen’s “Blood Wolf Moon”
“[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.’”
Night Stalkers
“hide in the bushes,/imagine we’re soldiers on patrol,/evading the Krauts and the Japs.”
I Thought I’d Live ‘til Ninety-five
“I envisioned myself old on a mountain hike/a soft breeze lifting my long white hair/I thought I’d live ‘til ninety-five”
Asterisk*
“Sinister pinwheel/stuck to a breezeless sentence/as sly ornament—”
The Wake
“I swore I heard willows cry/through the zig zagged fields,/traveling through my universe/as quickly as the moon touches our light”
Haunted by the Sonnet: Erica Reid’s “Ghost Man on Second”
“In [Erica] Reid’s Ghost Man on Second, the real ghost man floating through the pages is the sonnet.”
Moth
“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.”
Nostalgia
the gilded tree that glitters in dusklight/like an upside-down chandelier
Witness. Target = Rubble
“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
“Bruises bloom roses; the blind bird has fled./Ocean quiet bedroom night light turned dim,/the sting of his fist purple on her skin.”
The Speech of Herbs: Melissa Kwasny’s “The Cloud Path”
“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…”
A Woodpecker Pecks
“the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook”
Villa 351
“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”
Hands Together Ghazal
“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.”
The Treachery of Poetry
“How/it both is, and is not/a type of existence.”
Still in the Holler
“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.”
The Buster’s Hand: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s “Rodeo”
“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…”
Bruegel, Columbidae, and Walking Home
“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.”
Moon Bloom and Lithopedion
“Night flower,/short-lived lover/of darkness,/offspring of cactus,/desert jewel/lulled awake/by moonbeams”
God’s in the Weeds: Daneen Bergland’s “The Goodbye Kit”
“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.”
Down at the Ecoplex
“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
“The hand drops a fresh globe/into the scoured skull, secures breath upon/the hemispheric nostrils and stands back,/appraising…”
Sand, Ash, or Mud: Valerie Witte’s “A Rupture in the Interiors”
“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.”
Mannequin Exposé
“Among a murder of mannequins/the guilty can’t be picked out of a lineup.”
Skwentna, AK
“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.”
For Your Penance
“There is a fervor that I do not surge with,/A saintliness with which I do not sing.”
Little Engines of Self: Joy Manesiotis’ “Revoke”
“It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials.”
Butter Weed
“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.”
Fire Island
“I scatter the sandpipers who/run from me/but not/the tides.”
Notes on Kitsch: Janice Harrington’s “Yard Show”
“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.”
Shadow
“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…”
Ben Jonson’s Prison Conversion
“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.”
How to Read Poetry
“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.”
Following Bishop, This Excess Our Sentience, and Amnesia Palace
“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 Dead Are Difficult: Jenny George’s “After Image”
“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.”
The Disappearing Sonnet
“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”
The Lecher’s Lament
“Comfort me with ginseng—with sacraments/of a youthful wine-flushed god,/naked and beautiful, chanting a lecher’s lament.”
My Red Schwinn and Bird Shot
“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.”
Hair Clip
A poem by Nancy Byrne Ianucci.
Wrackable as Arguments: Anne-Marie Turza’s “Fugue with Bedbug”
“[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.”
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine Reschedules Christmas and Judges 9:45
“After supper,/God burps through his heartburn, eyes Gabriel/and—as expected—punishes: Two thousand years/hard labor for your antics, errand boy.”
Hair Clip and Dread Talk
“and I send her sunflowers on a sunny day./and I think of her children./and I sing with the Wailers.”
“No One Is Ever Really Just One Thing”: Laurel Nakanishi’s “Ashore”
“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
Gods and Angels and Other Poems
“The Sistine Chapel hived billions/of microbes, moss piglets/throbbing on God’s finger, frescoes flooded/with bacteria, angels fruiting cocci.”
Étude: Perspective Photo Lyric
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.
Scribe in Disguise: Amy Beeder’s “And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey”
“[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.”
Old Men Coughing
“Coughing, ululating, barking, whooping./Can he cough out the memory of a lonely/girl waiting, wanting, watching, waiting?”
Quan Yin
“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.”
Fierce Lyric in Karla Kelsey’s “Blood Feather”
“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
Shifting Patterns and The Rose
“Ever human-centric/We self-aggrandized/Anthropomorphized/And now agonize.”
Ekphrasis and Eugene Datta’s “Water and Wave”
“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.”
Paying For Pleasure
“The old man had paid dearly/he could still get lost in dreams”
Homelands
“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.”
Villanelle on a Theme from Rimbaud and Other Poems
“He feels himself watched/as he counts accents./He knows the painter’s/watching for the precise moment/when his blue ink freezes.”
How To Write Lyric Poetry
“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.”
Arteries & Veins
“In oncoming lights, my veins are dirty strings.”
After Emily Dickinson, “Circumference thou Bride of Awe”
“Every night/A lover be”
Midnight Sutra
“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”
A Different Kind of Knowledge: Matthew Zapruder’s “I Love Hearing Your Dreams”
“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.”
Salamander
“Held in palm,/a bloom of peony to/inspect.”
You Hesitate, You Die
“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”
Poems Without a Passport: Solmaz Sharif’s “Customs”
“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.”
Duncan Farm
“to my dog/Nate/as he is finishing/a seizure/i repeat/i am with you”
Cicada Season
“Wire/protects the beech/from bladed lovers/initial-besotted for years,/each letter a small death.”
Syllabic Fits of Speech: Cedar Sigos’ “All This Time”
“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
AquaDom
“Soon first responders make a grim/assessment of the odd catastrophe.”
A Fresh Look at André Spears’ “From the Lost Land I-XII”
“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.”
Three Poems by Jonathan Ukah
“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…”
Lynn Xu’s Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight
“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.”
Three Poems by Ace Boggess
“I scan rooms with a happiness detector,/which is like a broken Geiger counter/that stays silent while the bombs go off.”
Off-Road
“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.”
Kink or Worship or Both: Megan Fernandes’ “I Do Everything I’m Told”
“In invoking (and sometimes tweaking) cherished predecessors, this gently impious collection also helps refurbish form.”
The Elegant Trogon and Poem for Robert Desnos
“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
“Lost in the Woods is a symptom/of heart’s sudden loss/of direction registered in small/persistent cramps and little gasps.”
That Wind
“Night’s ink congeals on rice, coating peas/like black sea pebbles glistening in the harrowed/moonlight staring through the shattered kitchen window.”
“Mandarin Duck” and Other Poems
“In shallow ripples bathing together in pairs, as may be seen by the deep, clear waters of Xiangjiang.”
For Whom the Nobel Tolls: Tomas Tranströmer’s “The Blue House”
“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.”
Rossetti’s Notebook (1862-1869)
“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.”
The Creases Between Utterances: Jenny Xie’s “The Rupture Tense”
“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.”
Let It Be Known
“On its dead claws and back, mottled and plain,/from a long beach whose gulls roost on an edge,/Inscrutable.”
“I ask your forgiveness; I am a mountain tiger”
“Why does she ask forgiveness?/For what and from whom?/Why does she call herself/a mountain tiger?”
Edgar Kunz’s “Tap Out” and “Fixer”
“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.’”
Life Cycle of the Cabbage White Butterfly
“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.”
The Return
“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. “
On Arthur Sze’s “The Silk Dragon II”
“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.”
The Indian and Draw Near, White Man
“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.”
Walking the Butter Mill Trail
“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.”
Turkey Buzzard
“Here on a narrow one-lane/overgrown with cattails and ivy/the circle of turkey buzzards draws closer.”
Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite
“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.”
Show and Tell
“In the actual, from which another life/Is straining to burst, to set out in navigation,/Or be swallowed by demons in the leaves.”
Smart Fish Don’t Bite
“One of these days,/the guy with the rod won’t be so kind./This is why we hear about the liars,/hypocrites and crooks like Spiro Agnew,/Richard Nixon, Jimmy Swaggart,/Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried…”
Journey Through Mountains
“So many stars and mountains, crests and sky,/Are we not fools to think that we can know/What underlies such intricate designs?”
Lisa Olstein’s Dream Apartment
“The Dream Apartment is no Barbie’s Dream House. It is rather an abode of opaque and backlit, sometimes hard-edged reverie.”
Burma
“My mad uncle had the Burma jungle/In his head—burnt-out tracts of history/He’d stalk in ambush of his sanity”
Death of the Polar Explorers
“Doubt/Never stunned the marrow in their bones/Who rose above the merely physical,/And if they faltered, it was only once—”
Cycling at Vésinet
“Her long hair, the color of her pants,/falls down her back. She has what appears to be a flower tucked behind her left ear.”
A Taste of Poetry from the Late Tang Dynasty
“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.”
Sarcasm
“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.”
How KFC Gives Prisoners a Taste of Normal Life
“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.”
For Love Nor Money
“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.”
Coming to Terms with a Lifetime of Trauma While in Prison
“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.”
You Tread on My Dreams
“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.”
One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians
“There’s also a roadside historical marker/noting the massacre of the Lee family/by ‘an Indian war party’ in 1782.”
Excerpt: “Red Hands”
“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.”
Prima Facie
“‘Sometimes all a man needs is a horizon/in which to vanish,’ I thought.”
Like Hosea
“Or was it the Living God/Who did do this,/And not Hosea?”
Dying in Amsterdam
“What magnificent coordination. A ballet/on wheels. Impossible, but there it was/day after rainy day, not one collision.”
From Town Bloody Hall to 2023: A Tale of Two Debates on Women’s Liberation
“Avoiding these truly current, red hot issues, the women speak past each other.”
With Action, Gran Turismo Crosses the Finish Line. With Drama, Not So Much
“On the basis of viscerality alone, Gran Turismo is worth the price of admission for the two-hour cruise along.”
Un Carro Triste: A Melancholic Car
“We must take the language/by surprise;/seal its every utterance/with a kiss or tear…”
On the Road to Damascus
“So here I am in the Radnor Township/Police Department Drunk Tank/in a white paper jumpsuit, shoelaces/removed to be sure I don’t hang myself…”
Dictionary
“Sometimes—in the middle of fair night—/when disobedient moon turns vandal/and violently rips off the bolts/of my window-shutters, my eyelids…”
Bird Life: A Triptych
“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.”
Mark Goldblatt and the Art of Persuasion
“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?”
Doing the Woke
“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.”
On Wimbledon Champion Vic Seixas Reaching the Century Mark
“As he reaches the century mark, Elias Victor Seixas Jr. deserves our respect and gratitude for leading a long and extraordinary life.”
Letter to the Editor: In Defense of Rereading
“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.”
Should You Read the Same Book Twice?
“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?”
The Lie of the Land
“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”
Traffic
“And where, but in constant circularity/Is all this moving headed?/The answer Cannot be death…”
A Once Unnecessary Reminder: Criticism Produces Good Works
“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…”
The Tide
“‘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.”
Love Makings
“Yet there is no one thing, no attribute/Of yours that I can fix on, nothing/I can abstract, describe, isolate…”
Abortion and the Mythic Mother
“They do not realize good mothering comes from fearlessness. Few things promote more fear than being deprived of control of one’s own body.”
Five Poems of Neighborhood
“‘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.’”
Fetterman v. Oz (And a Love Letter to a Conflicted Pennsylvania)
“Not everything stays the same, and, in many cases, it probably should not.”
George Psalmanazar and the Extreme Art of Imposture
“Many of us also like impostors because, deep down, we understand that to exist only matter-of-factly, without fiction, would be intolerable.”
Review: James I. Porter’s “Homer: The Very Idea”
“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.’”
4 x 9
“Anyone who keeps/A compost heap knows the whole of life”
Dimorphism
“And that we might as well stop killing one another,/because everyone who lived during the French Revolution is dead anyways.”
As the Leaves Begin to Change
“In that waltz, you find me now/Singing, dancing, with the moon”
Youth
“and Pastor speaks with God, while I/repent my youth that/like the flower which fades/has been my secret, golden calf.”
Fly Fishing
“What does it bring to light?/What meaning is there to land?/Have you killed a bit of me? I doubt it.”
Moving Clockwise around Easton County
“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.”
Review: Philip Freeman’s “Hannibal”
“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.”
Silver Lining
“The silver lining is/you won’t be catching planes/to drag yourself away”
Woodmont
Review: Eden Collinsworth’s “What the Ermine Saw”
“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.”
Review: Riley Black’s “The Last Days of the Dinosaurs”
“This is a story about the meek inheriting the Earth.”
Famous First Words
“All those routines!/And unhappiness can be alike.”
Footnote to Larkin
“We should also be kind while we may.”
Oncology
“More truths than cancer creep beneath our speech.”
Review: “Saving Yellowstone” by Megan Kate Nelson
“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.”
“Father Stu”: A Story of Hardship and Redemption
“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.”
The River Walk
“They bring us here, to a place/Elsewhere, where there is no motion”
The Irresistible Passion of Peter Paul Rubens
“Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.”
Review: Bruce Clark’s “Athens: City of Wisdom”
“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.”
Fifty Years of “The Godfather”
It has been 50 years since The Godfather was widely released in the United States on March 24, 1972.
Review: Roosevelt Montás’s “Rescuing Socrates”
“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.”
Epilogue
“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.”
Dante’s Divine Valentine
“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.”
Review: Arnold Weinstein’s “The Lives of Literature”
“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.”
Equinox
“Yet the cold does not rest there.”
The Relevance of Tolkien’s Unfinished Work “The New Shadow”
“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.”
The Real Heroism of Odysseus
“Odysseus has before him the fantastical dream of every man: immortality and sex. He ultimately gives that up for mortality with his family.”
Warding off Scurvy
“Because there’s little more to friendship than warding off scurvy or having a catch.”
Is Ovid Still Worth Reading?
“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.”
America “Un-tied”
“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.”
But Thinking Makes It So
“Thinking leads to Hell. The way is wide…”
Toward a Politics of Reconciliation: John Sayles’s “Lone Star,” after 25 Years
“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.”
On the Eve of His Comeback, James Bond Resonates for a Reason
“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.”
Flyover Blues: The Enduring Relevance of F. Scott Fitzgerald
“One hundred years after Fitzgerald’s great novels, we are living in the same world as Nick Carraway, Amory Blaine, and Jay Gatsby.”
she asked me to get her a green card
“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.”
Review: Louis Menand’s “The Free World”
“In many ways, the book also reads as a eulogy to a liberal, liberalizing, and internationalist America.”
The Two-faces of Classical Music: Criticism Good, Bad, and Ugly
“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.”
Sir Roger Scruton’s Wagner
“Scruton loved Wagner. The two were a match made in heaven, or hell, depending on your perspective and appreciation of irony.”
Amor Fati
“Which is worse—/A hard death/Or a hard birth—”
What “Star Wars” Taught Me about War, Liberty, and Human Nature
“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.”
Open Carry in the Time of the Pandemic
“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.”
Virgil’s War and Peace
“Two millennia later, we are still warring over the meaning of Virgil’s Aeneid.”
Epicycle(s)
“Wilderness of whys./Labyrinth of I’s./Foreground, background./Busy, busy eyes.”
Odysseus: the First Western Man
“Odysseus is the first recognizably Western man.”
In Every Time and Every Place: the Political Nuance of “Legend of Galactic Heroes”
“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.”
Buried Treasure
“Dad never searched for buried treasure again. He instead bought lottery tickets, entered contests online, and invested in a million dinar after Iraq fell…”
How “Ms .45” and Zoë Lund Paved Abel Ferrara’s Way
“In the end, these are movies about redemption and what it means to be redeemed, whatever the struggle in getting there.”
When We’ve Stopped Reading
“By sheer accident, one man in this stupefied future learns how to read.”
Review: Michael Shnayerson’s “Bugsy Siegel”
“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.”
Third Wave
“The statistics were/like our scores—and we wanted/to lead the boards…”
Dawn in Pennsylvania
“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.”
Why James Bond Is a Positive Role Model for Young Americans
“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?”
Review: Jan Swafford’s “Mozart: The Reign of Love”
“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.”
Review: “The Klondike Bake-Oven Deaths”
“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.”
What Ortega y Gasset and Orwell Both Foresaw
“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.”
The Moral Philosophy of Plutarch
“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.”
What Latvia Understands That America Doesn’t
“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.”
My Experience Being Cancelled, Twice
“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.”
Review: Nicholas McDowell’s “Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton”
“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.”
Don’t Cancel the Classics—We Need Them More Than Ever
“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.”
General Patton’s Silent Night
“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.”
Beware the Interpreter: “Hillbilly Elegy” as a Prime Example
“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.”
Ten Novels for Understanding the Modern British Identity
“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…”
Review: Clint Margrave’s “Lying Bastard”
“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.”
A Korean Dyad
“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.”
Self-Determination and Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik”
“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.”
“Gone with the Wind” Isn’t Going Anywhere
“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).”
The Oedipus Complex of a Nation in Flux
“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.”
[Give the Man a Name]
“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.”
What “The Merchant of Venice” Has to Say about Justice
“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.”
Achilles, Priam, and the Redemptive Power of Forgiveness
“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.”
Maurizio Cattelan and When Art “Ridicules Art Itself”
“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.”
Can We Read Moby Dick?
“But, as I found myself stumbling in my response to my sister, a more elemental question arose: Can we read Moby Dick?”
Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”: Where Is Meaning to be Found?
“Aeschylus’ tragedy represents the most elemental aspects of our human condition: all human flourishing comes with a cost.”
Aristophanes: The First Poet Critic
In the words of German poet Henrich Heine: “There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.”
Why Aeschylus Still Matters Today
“But Aeschylus’ cosmos goes beyond Homer’s in presenting Reason, Persuasion, as an integral aspect of the cosmos that was otherwise absent in Homer.”
Poetry and Modernity
“Any civilization or culture is itself a vast dynamic interpretation or, we could even say, a vast dynamic work of art.”