Tom Engelhardt: Welcome to the Martians!
Our World Is Increasingly Like a Science-Fiction Novel.
Michael T. Young: Reflections on Richard Hugo’s Poetry
I believed the necessity
of that suffering world, hoping it would learn not to do
it again. But I was young. The world never learns.
Video: Grace & Dignity
This video is about faces and bodies and how we move them, which is far, far more important than we realize. This crazy journey begins with Audrey Hepburn, runs through German and Chinese philosophy, and, by various and sundry routes, arrives back at each and every one of us.
Woody Lewis: Guns Under the Bed (book review)
Anyone who protested the Vietnam war will appreciate the candor of Jody Forrester’s memoir.
Stanley Stepanic: More ‘disease’ than ‘Dracula’ – how the vampire myth was born
The first known reference to vampires appeared in written form in Old Russian in A.D. 1047, soon after Orthodox Christianity moved into Eastern Europe.
Melissa Chim: How do you spot a witch? This notorious 15th-century book gave instructions – and helped execute thousands of women
Women on the fringes of society, such as healers in Europe or the slave Tituba in Salem, were convenient scapegoats for society’s ills.
Sharon Fagan McDermott: Three Ways of Looking at Beauty
When the hypnotherapist brought me out of my trance, I wondered about this deer, about my new vision of beauty—why had it changed? Something fundamental in me had shifted and reconstructed itself.
Angele Ellis: Dances of Death | In Tango Below a Narrow Ceiling, an experimental young Syrian poet makes his book-length debut in English
What would happen in this vast dagger
If America stopped eating human flesh
For three days?
Steve Nolan: With Aeneas in a Time of Plague by Christopher Bursk | Review
With Aeneas in a Time of Plague by Christopher Bursk Ragged Sky Press (July 5, 2021) $15.00. 98 pages . I believe every poet has a good reason why they … Continue reading
Rachel Hadas: What do the classics teach us about hope?
How do we weather this welter of bad news? How do we adapt?
Rachel Hadas: Lessons of Poetry
It is easier to lecture about the time and place of a book, the culture that produced it, the special historical or linguistic problems involved in it. It is harder…to face the book as a masterpiece and to help the student understand why it is a masterpiece….
Jose Padua: In Proclamation to the Emperors of Agony
Seeing an audience in Central Park holding up their middle fingers in unison is one of my fondest memories—even though I wasn’t among those for whom the finger was intended.
Doug Anderson: The Gravestone and the Continuing Self
When I was in my twenties I thought old age was an island only accessible by a bridge I’d never cross. But I’ve crossed it, and at seventy-eight the subject … Continue reading
Doug Anderson: Negative Capability
…art that honors the art and artist as well as its content, and apprehends it as more than its socio-political reality. Art is hard to do and not everybody can do it. It is not merely a pretext for theory.
Vox Populi 