My friend Caroline Finkelstein died early this week, not a year after she was first diagnosed with colon cancer. I met Caroline when she was finishing her MFA at Goddard College in 1978 and I briefly taught there. Caroline knew a lot about European history, painting, architecture, and gardening, subjects about which I know little. […]
I first met Ruth Lepson when Alice James Books was publishing Dreaming in Color in 1980 and we were both working members of the collective. Her subsequent books include I Went Looking for You and Morphology, a collaboration with photographer Steve Crump, both from BlazeVOX. Now I get to catch up with ask anyone, her […]
The people along the sand All turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day. As long as it takes to pass A ship keeps raising its hull; The wetter ground like glass Reflects a standing gull. The land may vary more; But wherever the […]
From the first poem in Magpiety to the last, it’s obvious that language is a matter of life or death for Melissa Green. Every detail is perceived not just with clarity but in motion, whether it’s the birds foraging a resurrected field in “April” that strike “like fired shafts from a branch’s shuddering bow,” or […]
Recently I was going through a plastic tub of old papers in search of letters written thirty years ago. Encounters with a past self are always startling, even after finishing a book called Know Thyself, and when I found the letters, I didn’t open them immediately. Instead I read other notes, files, and manuscripts I’d […]
Kathryn Schulz’s article in this week’s New Yorker led me to consider my own relationship to Walden—a text as misconstrued by the public, according to Schulz, as Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” For decades I resisted reading it. I had started once, and been turned off by Thoreau’s expense ledger and Yankee glee at […]
Larry Levine was killed by a lone gunman at Umpqua Community College while teaching Writing 115, an introductory class that I would describe as “Freshman Comp.” I was an adjunct freshman comp instructor at Massasoit Community College almost forty years ago, and I remember what it was like to offer students the possibility of authority […]
Can you tell yourself a joke? Or is that like trying to tickle your own ribs—impossible to succeed, and odd to try. I ask because Andrea Cohen’s brilliant, tough new collection begins with a comedy routine played with a ghost: “I tell my mother/I’ve won the Nobel Prize.//Again? she says. Which/ discipline this time?” The […]
Recently I joined Facebook, and among the resulting friend requests were some in languages other than English and scripts other than Roman. I was struck by how quickly the network broached boundaries of space and time, introducing me to strangers across the globe in nanoseconds—even if the strangers were spammers or bots. The international scope […]