Tag: poetry
Samson-Oak: A Review of The Common Misfortunes of Everyday Plants
Nature is never pure in these poems; it is always responding to human care or lack-of-care, commodified, and, indeed, turned into a symbol by the poet herself. Emerson doesn't hide the grief that haunts this book; it is about the death of a child.
Paterson and Poetic Fidelity
Creative fidelity is attuned to, and draws out, the richness in people and things. It calls for awareness and attentive seeing. In the end, Paterson is a film about such creative fidelity to a place and its people.
The This-ness of This Place: Introducing Belle Point Press and Mid/South...
Raised in Eastern Oklahoma with roots older than living memory in the Natural State, we look forward to supporting new authors while connecting readers with the long thread of our region’s creative culture. Our mission is to celebrate the literary culture of the American Mid-South: all its paradoxes and contradictions, all the ways it gets us home.
Farming as Poetical: Masanobu Fukuoka and Wendell Berry on Agriculture’s Poetical...
Poetry is the creative ordering of words to bring forth the fruits of the human heart and intellect. The poet is called to lose himself, so to speak, in listening to inspiration, a power that is classically understood to be beyond him. Similarly, the farmer is called to lose himself in the rhythms of the land he cares for, emptying himself, heart and mind, into the land.
Dos Passos: The Modernist Path That Wasn’t
We have lost something of great value in forgetting the work of John Dos Passos. He was a man who knew who deserved his sympathy, and his work followed his instincts. Dos Passos didn’t follow a line; he followed reality.
“unsafe, unnumb”: The Unshod Poetry of Bower Lodge
This is poetry that focuses its readers on the true, good, and beautiful. Here, we are reminded that Christ took on flesh like ours, that he was born as we are, that he died as we will.
Poetry and Politics with A.M. Juster
Michael J. Astrue has earned degrees from Yale and Harvard. He had a long and distinguished legal career and held several government positions as...
Fallen From Eden: Reading the Poetry of Catullus
Catullus is not a saint. He is not a moral poet. But his crudity and madness still dance with the shadows of truth and echo with the cry of the human heart.
Living In the Myth: A Review of Jason Stacy’s Spoon...
Benjamin Myers reviews Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy. Stacey explores the changing and contested myth of the midwestern small town, particularly in relation to Masters’s famous Spoon River Anthology. In Spoon River and its echoes throughout literary and popular culture, innocence struggles with cynicism, tradition with modernity, and a persistent populism with a perpetual elite.
A Comedy with a Sad Ending: #MeToo and Pope’s Rape of...
Daniel Ritchie explores how the #MeToo movement affects our reading of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In turn, this comedy with a sad ending offers us a sense of balance for today's sexual politics.