Mary Oliver & Gerard Manley Hopkins
Last week I read Gerard Manley Hopkins at length for the first time (I’d read “Spring and Fall” several times…
Poetry, Fiction & the Arts
Grid-bolted Desks
The twenty-seven desks of Bunche 3117, a small UCLA classroom, remain bolted to the floor, as they have been for…
Meditation and Story
Washing the dishes, I listened tonight to “Carols of the Times,” composer Bob Chilcott’s introduction to the Festival of Nine…
Los Angeles Made Wild: Eloise Klein Healy, Artemis in Echo Park
Eloise Klein Healy is one of those writers whose style became associated with L.A. after the 1960s: loose lines, conversational…
Infinity Mirror: Hans Eijkelboom, People of the Twenty-First Century
Hans Eijkelboom is a photographer. In his brief and helpful afterword, the critic David Carrier characterizes Eijkelboom as a modern…
The Awful Mystery of the Divine: Tim Miller, Hymns & Lamentations
Last month, the poet Tim Miller published a large batch of my poems in Underfoot, an online journal he co-edits…
After Auschwitz, Poetry: Ewa Chrusciel’s Of Annunciations
Theodor Adorno warned against poetry after Auschwitz. To write it, he said, is “barbaric” because “critical intelligence … confines itself…
Paper Raincoats and Concrete Warships
I am reading Bashō, Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Narrow Road recounts Bashō’s late-17th century…
The Power of Recursion: Inger Christensen & Alexander Theroux
Since last summer, I’ve been reading Alphabet, a collection from the late Danish poet Inger Christensen, alongside Alexander Theroux’s The…
Memory. Oblivion.
I’ve taken a break from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s massive novel-memoir My Struggle to read a very different kind of autobiography: Georges…
Left Write & Centaur 