I looked hurriedly through Miss Thater’s Designs. I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of them. Page after lined page of meticulously plotted circular or ovoid geometric forms of various sizes, all arranged symmetrically around a grounding middle field. The forms were laid out first in pencil, probably freehand, then filled in with color from colored pencils or inked pens. No design was quite like another.
The literary critic Stanley Fish has lamented that when poets are not taught in classrooms, they cease to exist. That’s extreme, but there’s some truth to it, and among modern American poets, a case in point is Robinson Jeffers. He’s rarely on syllabi, and it has been this way for a long time. But at his best, Jeffers is a powerful Nature poet. He’s well worth reading, studying, and learning from.
There was a quite extensive exhibit of Caspar David Friedrich paintings at the Albertinum, one of the art museums in Dresden. One has the feeling that there is always a Caspar David Friedrich exhibit at one of the art museums of Dresden. Nonetheless I was glad for it. I was glad to move slowly from one canvas to the next and to see more Friedrich paintings in one location than I had ever seen before.
In July 2024, Pope Francis issued an extraordinary 5000-word Pastoral Letter titled “On the Role of Literature in Formation.” At first, he says, he’d thought of addressing it to people engaged in pastoral work, including of course priests; but then he realized that his audience should be all Christians—because his subject was “the value of reading novels and poems as part of one’s path to personal maturity.”
Close-reading any poem by Wallace Stevens can look like hard, dizzying work, but it can become a happy romp rather than a baffled slog if you can do it with a friend who loves language as much as you do. I know this because I have such a friend, one whom I recently invited to Zoom with me through Stevens’s “Note on Moonlight.”
Here’s a poem by Yvor Winters (1900-1968), written during World War II, when California was on guard against possible attacks by the Japanese navy and air force. I’d like to lead you through this poem, and share a lesson I learned from reading and thinking about it.
Turning: an, if not the, essential act of Jewish life. Teshuvah, we call it. Repentance, it’s translated. “Teshuvah,” writes Rabbi Alan Lew, is “a Hebrew word that we struggle to translate. We call it repentance. We call it return. We call it a turning. It is all of these things and none of these things. It is a word that points us to the realm beyond language, the realm of pure motion and form.”
Scott Cairns’s new poetry collection, just published by Slant Books, is called Correspondence with My Greeks. The title is intriguing. “Correspondence,” of course, has a dual meaning: “communicating with” but also “connection or similarity to.” I think both meanings are at play in this collection. What Cairns gives us in this volume are seventy-eight such conversations (correspondences) as connections.
What I’ve been reading is the account of many long and short conversations between Goethe and a person named Johann Peter Eckermann, who was a youngish literary-minded fellow who sent Goethe some of his writing, writing that was rather ass-kissy in its love of, and reliance on, a Goethian way of thinking, and so Eckermann sent Goethe some of this Goethe-worshiping writing and Goethe, unsurprisingly, lapped it up and invited Eckermann to come and visit him at his fancy house in Weimar.
My friend and colleague Robert Garis died in January 2001, age 75. Bob was a superb close reader, maybe the best I have ever met, vivid and exact in his responses to literature, and to film, ballet, and music as well. I admired Bob tremendously, his seriousness and intensity, and his joy too, his pleasure in being in the company of exceptional authors, composers, directors, and choreographers.
What I began to do was to pore over the Greek of the original, compare my own impressions with existing translations—where they existed—and in a crazy mixture of line-stealing, argumentation, agreement, and general response to what came to mind as I read the Greek and the English versions, I answered these poets with poems of my own.
The title poem of Suzanne Nussey’s debut poetry collection, Slow Walk Home, comes at the end of the book’s first section, called “My Father’s House.” In the poem “Slow walk home,” she is a young child walking with her father on his weekly visits to parishioners. On their way back home, she muses ominously “This day / an empty tablet not yet tipped / toward calamity.”
2024 marks the fortieth anniversary since the publication of the novel Bright Lights, Big City. It was the first book by Jay McInerney, and probably to his chagrin, the one for which he is still known the most. If you know anything about it at all, you probably remember the novel’s signature reference to cocaine as “Bolivian Marching Powder,” in which the twenty-something male protagonist, in the middle of an emotional breakdown, indulges on a parade of mirrors and in nightclub bathrooms.
Prayer. It never fails. I take my place in the pew. I fling my tallis, my prayer shawl, over my head. It lands like a bird on my shoulders. I put on my reading glasses. I take the siddur, the prayer book, from its pocket in the back of the pew in front of me. Because I never arrive on time, I search for the place where we are in the service.
The New Testament is essential reading for me. But sometimes I wonder what it is I’m reading, and that’s because I don’t know Greek. I should have made the effort to learn this language long ago. Now I’m old, and it feels too late. I re-read, study, and think about the New Testament from afar, in multiple English-language versions. Here’s a passage from David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament (2017; 2nd ed., 2023), Luke 5: 1-11, where Jesus speaks to a crowd and then to the fishermen who will become his disciples.
On this upcoming family camping trip, there are so many things I should be reading. But what do I want to read? It must be something best consumed in brief snippets. I may take a volume of R H Blyth’s haiku translations. But even that is too much in the way of commentary (brilliant though it is) when what I want is something pared down to essentials, something crystalline, elemental, vivid, this-worldly. The only narrative I’m interested in is that of travel in this world.
I suggest a sub-genre of dead-cat-in-a-well poems, even though I have only discovered two instances so far. In both poems, a grandfather lowers his young grandson down into a well to clean it, dredging up a dead cat in the process. The recently deceased North Carolinian Fred Chappell, may he rest in peace, provides our first instance, titled “Cleaning the Well,” published in his 1975 collection River . The Alabama-born Paul Ruffin offers a second instance. His poem, also named “Cleaning the Well,” appears in his 1980 collection Lighting the Furnace Pilot.
In The New Yorker’s May 27, 2024, issue, Kathryn Schulz has a fascinating article called “Wait For It: Suspense in Literature and Life.” Her thesis is that every kind of literature—not just murder mysteries—is full of suspense. “In fact, outside of phone books and instruction manuals, it’s almost impossible to find a written work that doesn’t make use of suspense to captivate its readers.
I think moments from my own life always find their way into my fiction, but certainly this novel and my earlier short stories blend both personal experience and invention. That’s typical for most writers I know and have read about. The narrator, Joe, began as a character similar to me, but so did his girlfriend Ashley. I suppose they both mirror basic aspects of my life.
I want to talk about seeing angels and about speaking with angels. I myself have not seen an angel. I have also not spoken with angels. I’m not even sure what an angel is. I’m not just saying that I doubt the existence of angels, I’m saying that the whole concept of an angel, even as a literary or biblical trope, is obscure to me. Nonetheless, I can’t stop thinking about angels.