Writers & Poets

Defending Lasch, Left and/or Right

Wichita, KS. No one, I think, has ever summed up the longing for a life with front porches--the localist longing which is this blog's...

Larry McMurtry and Wendell Berry at the Dairy Queen

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 were people he’d known and loved. And when he died last week, he was probably the last person in Archer City who had any connection to those people at all.

Bob Dylan: The Lyricist

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....

For Craft and Country: Richard Wakefield’s Eminent Domain

Richard Wakefield’s book of poems takes its place as one more important and hard-won advance in the restoration of good poetry to our culture.

Another Night Like All The Rest

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

Prairie Fires and Prairie Romances

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,...

Booth Tarkington after the Great War, ‘That Disquieted and Questioning Time’

In this excerpt from America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928, Tarkington reflects on the changes he observed in America following...

Some Permanent Things

Devon, PA.  Here is a poem of mine that has just appeared in the poetry journal The Dark Horse and on Ernest Hilbert's ever...

Wendell Berry in the Big City

Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky will be in the Greater D.C. area this week, appearing at the Arlington Central Library Auditorium on Tuesday, May 4 at 7 p.m. Come early!

Their Time Up at State College

East Lansing, MI.  Back home in the steady snows of Michigan, I came across an old poem of mine, the other day, that seems...