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The words we use
Life magazine’s coverage of the Watts riots in 1965 has a lesson for the Treyvon ...
Wait, you get to decide what you like?
My reading of verse this year has been sometimes depressing, since I’ll never be able to write like, say, Wallace Stevens; it’s also made me angry given the pretentious, self-absorbed habits of some contemporary poets bred in the hothouses of writing programs where novelty was valued more highly than rigor or sense (pace Flannery O’Connor), […]
Being messy
I always feel reassured when I see other writers’ first drafts, since they look kind of like mine–hopeless. On the other hand, Ben Jonson commented that his friend Shakespeare never revised, though readers then and now agree that sometimes he should have. We have it on no lesser an authority than Ernest Hemingway that the […]
From poem to lyric?
Not every poem can be easily or beautifully set to music. A few years ago I read Auden’s Christmas Oratorio with great excitement, but it’s not hard to see why Benjamin Britten reneged on his promise to write music for it: I’m pretty sure it would have been longer than The Ring Cycle! Today I […]
Louis MacNeice
I’ve begun studying Autumn Journal (1939) with great love. Though shorter, it’s every bit as brilliant as Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Wordsworth’s Prelude. I have to take my time to read the sections over and over, noticing and appreciating different things on each read—diction, rhythm, assonance, consonance, rhyme, closure, the power and pathos. I’m sorry […]
Thinking about Jenny Xie
A few things I noticed about Xie’s verse…