Writers & Poets 232

In a folder of papers at my desk there are reminders of things to do sometime, although they aren’t urgent. Waiting to be filed is a copy of Billy Collin’s…

“It is a pleasure to carry out one’s duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one’s name on it certifying,…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Rod Dreher and I aren't close friends, but like many Front Porch Regulars, I've been blessed with the opportunity to associate with and learn from…

Given the unpopular and uncompromising stands that Wendell Berry takes, it’s only natural that many readers fiercely disagree with him. Some of these disagreements are simply matters of preference. As…

Bob Dylan: The Lyrics, 1961-2012 Reviewed by Robert Dean Lurie I am one of the infected; I am a Bob Dylan fan. It wasn’t always this way. When I first…

Grand Rapids, MI Leonard Cohen has done his last show, composed his last song, and breathed his last breath. When the news popped up on the screen of my laptop…

One of the pleasures of living near the Canadian border is Canuck radio, which due to local content regulations (the good protectionism) plays a steady diet (varying greatly in nutritional…

Minnesota's second literary Nobelist is the subject of The Political World of Bob Dylan: Freedom and Justice, Power and Sin, a perceptive book by our porchite colleague Jeff Taylor. Herewith…

Earlier this year, several publications celebrated Walker Percy’s 100th birthday. However, for the most part, the occasion went largely unnoticed. Although Percy is still well regarded in many circles, most…

And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate —but there…

For some time, I saw Gene Logsdon as a wiry bearded fellow in slouch hat and knee boots, striding purposefully across a field he was sowing by hand. That was…

The Porch lost a part of its patrimony yesterday with the passing of Gene Logsdon. News of his death can be found here, and his obituary here. An appreciation of…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] This past weekend here in Wichita, I participated in the Eighth Day Institute's symposium, Soil and Sacrament: The World as Gift; Rod Dreher has a…

Louisville, Kentucky.  “Reading Florence King is like opening a blast furnace,” reporter Liz Trotta said of her years ago. That fire is now out. The writer and satirist died on…

My wife and I were married at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, on the near west side of South Bend, Indiana.  I’ve written about her before, that Church, fashioned nearly two…

Over the years, I have made the case, here and elsewhere, for the recovery of the traditional work of poetry.  The habits of mind and body that we cultivate and…

From The American Conservative, my thoughts on FPR contributor Jeff Taylor's new book on Bob Dylan.

He wrote sixty-five books and had a hand in another hundred and thirty-five.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Twenty years ago, the concept and label "communitarianism" was riding high, or at least as high as any broadly applicable yet intellectually coherent ideological movement…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] As I write this review, I keep hearing about Jeb Bush, campaigning for president, talking about how the invasion of Iraq and the removal of…

I am the illegitimate son of Dorothy Day and H.D. Thoreau.

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY - I’m overjoyed that the phiz of that bastard Alexander Hamilton, the father of corporate capitalism, will be removed from the $10 bill he has for so…

Rockford, Illinois.  After thirty-one years at Chronicles Magazine—thirty of them as editor—classicist, poet and polemicist Tom Fleming has retired. During his tenure at this small but influential magazine of the…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] A few weeks ago I was able to, once again, do something that I enjoy doing immensely--take a group of students out on a local…