Mike Schneider: Appreciating Charles Simic (1938-2023)
In the distance our great leader
Crowed like a rooster from a balcony,
Or was it a great actor
Impersonating our great leader?
Perin Gürel: What an old folktale can teach us about the ‘annoying persistence’ of political comedians
Donald Trump’s gleeful response to the show’s cancellation, and his suggestion that others will be “next up,” shows just how seriously some political figures take comedic critique.
Dion O’Reilly: Subject C, the Numinous, and Ellen Bass’s ‘Gate C-22’
“…the pure pleasure of the numinous poem, which, in the final analysis, might contain our personal myths, successful in the way myths are successful, in their transmission of complexity, magic, and the paradoxes of this painfully-beautiful world.”
Jordan Smith: These Days
The danger of elegy is that it just tells us what we already know: we lose and suffer and become the subject of the loss and suffering of others. Liam had no patience for what he called the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” school of poetry.
Sarah Beckerman: What fantasy stories teach us about defeating authoritarianism
More than offering an escape, fantasy worlds can also show what courage looks like when the odds are stacked against you.
Alfred McCoy: Did Mark Twain Imagine Donald Trump?
If Mark Twain were alive today, he would certainly have written a novel about Donald Trump. After all, his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, distinctly caught a nineteenth-century version of our Trumpian moment, tariffs and all.
Baron Wormser: What Nurtures Us, What Diminishes Us
Poetry is the remembrance and avowal of loss and is accordingly pushed aside.
Mike Schneider: Three Hats
When Oddjob flings his bowler
in Goldfinger, it leaps from his hand
& sails like a frisbee across a meadow
& hovers, or seems to, as in a dream
Michael Simms: All Time Most Popular Posts in Vox Populi (2014-2025)
Vox Populi was founded on April 1, 2014 when Nisha Gupta and I met for coffee and decided to start a website to support the anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania.
Sharon F. McDermott: How to Love a Transcendentalist
Walking across the quad, on my way to my first class, my senses swooned at the sight and scent of blossoms capping the apple trees with billowing clouds. Pink and white petals perfumed the air and spiraled down on breezy days. Bees hummed in the canopies; birds nested there.
Charles Harper Webb: Appetite
The crowds seem endless, tramping past
the Hunger Artist’s straw-filled cage to see
the panther’s glinting teeth and lethal stride.
Baron Wormser: Groovy
It’s fair to say that “groovy” has passed out of daily parlance. As words go, it was a bit silly, a bit mystic, a bit glib, a bit droll, a bit low-brow, a bit artless, and a bit wonderful. It spoke to an era and seemed, accordingly, germane to that era and almost sensible in its glad frankness.
Michael Simms: Five Pieces of Advice to Writers Who Want to Publish
Since I’ve been an editor and publisher for a long time, I’m often asked to advise first-time authors on how they can get their work into the world.
