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 […]
Welcome to my blog, a work in progress on the pleasures of reading and writing poetry. I planned to call it “Quartz,” after the first line of the title poem of The Hardness Scale. Blog posts aren’t polished diamonds, but they’re not meant to crumble like talc either. On the Mohs mineral hardness scale, quartz, […]