This post marks the beginning of a new irregular feature in Vox Populi. I hope readers of Vox Populi, many of whom are writers, will find the prompt helpful in stimulating their creativity.
In Sappho, the spaces name nothing — but the emptiness still speaks.
On the cusp of the most important election in these United States since the eve of the Civil War, a sobering fact is that our own history has eerily caught up with us, just as our history caught up with the Nazis of Germany between the First and Second World Wars.
If one of the defining tendencies of post-modernism is breaking down borders between high and low culture—such as between Beethoven and Elvis, Dylan is a supreme post-modernist. The cultural compass inscribed by his work is huge, flattering us by the depth of his learning and song awareness. We can follow or not—the songs don’t care.
When I studied and taught Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus the King,” the stress was on hubris, irony, blindness. What wasn’t emphasized is that the play was written during and is set in the midst of a plague.
…we must learn to nest in piles of our own rejection slips and somehow effectively grab hold of the levers and buttons that control the means of writerly production…
I wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha by tattooing the word WRONG across my heart to help me muster the strength I’d need to argue with a world that wanted me to say “hey, y’all!” in a hill-country accent sipping tea under a dogwood in a pink smock smattered with etchings of ivy.
“The Killer Inside Me” is a testament to moral accountability exultantly shredded, and its resonance today is uncanny.
As the world continues to endure the ravages of COVID-19, another ghost of Dickinson steps into view.
Good artists seem, in our alarming and prolonged time […] to be leaping over months, decades and centuries, to speak directly to us now.
We let the unresolved issues and crises that face us mount up beyond the poet’s window, as the writer gropes for a language in which to imagine something beyond the claustrophobic assumptions we have accepted as our grasp of the world.
Empires fall and buildings crumble, but songs and stories survive.
Remembering Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)
Dear Friends, Just want to let you know that we’ve added two new categories to our menu of posts: Fiction and Literary Criticism and Reviews. The menu can be found … Continue reading →