Writers & Poets 232

Here, in this shed’s unremarkable pool of silence, I am reminded of other places where silence stretched like an ocean. I happened upon one of those waning shores the previous…

Holding up a sign, sitting at a lunch counter, sticking a flower in a gun, setting up a tent, and occupying a space in the face state and corporate power…

Bugbee’s thought suggests a defiant confidence that the things themselves can and do reveal themselves to us in their independence, if only we would have the patience to let them.

In “American Divine,” it would seem that the pursuit is not so much a pursuit of divinity but rather the experience of it—the awe, which in this instance is private…

One answer from Kingsnorth’s fiction lies in limits. No human, nor all of us put together, is sovereign over the fate of the world, despite the unprecedented power we enjoy…

I’m not canceling Whitman. But my own enthusiasm for his poetry is waning. The poet whose daring versification and daring lifestyle were once seen as the epitome of counter-culture has…

The new things we learn about Ernest Hemingway in this documentary not only make him more interesting; they make his writing more remarkable.

Whether he takes us to the Texas frontier or to 1970s Houston, his prose never gets in the way of his story. He moves ahead with the precision and simplicity…

McMurtry couldn’t quite set the Bowie knife to the scalp of the Western like Cormac McCarthy did the same year, maybe because he knew those people weren’t grotesque caricatures; they…

The longing created in the reader to want to know Jack is not easily articulated. It is difficult to admit that though we love happy endings, we are inexplicably drawn…

As the late historian John Lukacs would insist, all stories as we know them and retell them are remembered. This means they are, inherently, personal. John Berryman and Robert Giroux:…

The enduring value of adding Jane Austen to my disciplines was not beholden to my expectation of enjoyment from a happy wedding nor was it dependent on my recognition that…

Men are fallen creatures who think they’re perfectible when in fact they’re hardly improvable.

Ordinary and unrefined, Kooser's poems suggest the steady hand of a craftsman who doesn’t need to go looking for the next big thing.

Those who do know her work might be a bit surprised if I suggest that Le Guin has a real porcher sensibility.

Why does Shakespeare offer us love instead of politics? Love is intimate. Love is about attachment. Love is about beauty. Love is local.

Berry wrote in one of his letters to Merton that “you are one of the few whose awareness of what I’m doing here would be of value to me.” He…

U.S. Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn and Mattie bring a type of vigilante justice to Tom Chaney, and we are glad, but Portis doesn’t allow us to be easy about…

MF: Mr. Chesterton, I know you have not received any training in economics at the University level.  So, I will keep this simple.  The world today, and throughout human history,…

In “The Dreams of Mrs. Flintwinch thicken,” a short chapter of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1857), the kind-hearted Arthur Clennam visits his childhood home. “Oppressive secrets” pervade the crumbling house…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The annual Prairie Festival at The Land Institute just outside Salina, KS, was held two months ago, but it's been much on my mind for…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Caroline Fraser's wonderful Prairie Fires is many things. Primarily it's a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the justly famous Little House books, and…

A couple of years ago my wife had a minor accident, the kind that results in an older car being mysteriously “totaled.” Before the man came to ferry our 2005…

  Recently David Brooks posted a New York Times op-ed lamenting an increase in “bailing,” which he defines as “flaking” on social commitments. The title of the article was “The…