Carlene M. Gadapee: Give Peace a Chance
The Burning World by Sherod Santos is a complicated and arresting mytho-historical and contemporary narrative demonstrating the pain of war and conflict.
Michael Simms: Orpheus in Hollywood
Michael Chabon hasn’t so much straddled genres as rejuvenated whatever he touches, making literary fiction more engaging and accessible and popular genres less cliched and formulaic.
Susan Farrell: Why Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to college graduates still matters today
If Vonnegut was, like the students’ fathers, a family man and a veteran, perhaps he also embodied the dad that students in 1969 dreamed their own fathers could be: funny, artistic, anti-establishment and anti-war.
Charles Bukowski: so you want to be a writer?
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
Michael Simms: Prospero needs a little nap
Vox Populi will endure, albeit at a slower pace.
Baron Wormser: Fool
After the fool leaves The Tragedy of King Lear, where
does he go?
Home to see the wife, play ringolevio with the
neighborhood kids?
Baron Wormser: Within The Weeping Was Joy
Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid
Stuart Sheppard: The War Against Aesthetics in Contemporary Art
Should art speak, or do we need to speak for it?
Joan E. Bauer: It Takes a Lifetime
They’d both mastered the ‘poetics of place,’
small-town Mississippi and post-war California.
Welty believed & surely Macdonald agreed:
‘No art ever came from not risking your neck.’
Baron Wormser: The Good Life
It’s plain that the world as we know it is literally choking on its machine- and money-driven complexity.
Molly Fisk: Death, Herself
UNDRESS, SHE SAID by Doug Anderson, Four Way Books, Tribeca 2022, 102 pages, $17.95 . . You might think, opening Doug Anderson’s fourth poetry collection Undress, She Said, that a man … Continue reading
Baron Wormser: Poetry and Paradise
One of the defining aspects of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, is poetry. The novel, devoted to the boyhood, young manhood, and then manhood proper (which is to say—war, disillusionment, and lost love) of Amory Blaine, traces the evolution of Amory’s sensibility.
Chris Wright: The Inspiring Outrage of Norman Finkelstein
Wokeness is what happens when the destruction of the labor movement proceeds so far, and social atomization becomes so all-consuming, that even the “left” adopts an individualistic, moralistic, psychologistic, censorious, self-righteous, performative approach to making social change.
Raphael Falco: How Bob Dylan used the ancient practice of ‘imitatio’ to craft some of the most original songs of his time
Bob Dylan is both a modern voice entirely unique and, at the same time, the product of ancient, time-honored ways of practicing and thinking about creativity.
Vox Populi 