Essays

Two and a half miles: that’s how far my wife and I moved from a house where we had lived for twenty-one years to our new house. Over the two decades plus one year, we accumulated a lot of stuff. Now was the time to downsize. No time to read. No time for friends. No time to exercise. No time, no time for anything other than sorting, distributing, discarding, wrapping, packing, lifting, carrying. Rather than a long-lined Whitmanesque experience, my daily life felt more like a shorter, more tightly lined Dickinson poem.

Recently my sister alerted me to Emily Wilson’s new book of essays: Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient Literature. I went right to the library to get it. The essays cover Sappho, Catullus, Aeschylus, and more. But I turned first to the one called “Translating the Odyssey.” It’s a long essay (sixty pages) and ambitious: Wilson’s purpose is to choose a few passages from the poem and follow each through several or sometimes all of its English translations, beginning with Chapman’s of 1616 and ending with her own.

Out of curiosity I consulted what Wikipedia has to say about this poem, and can report that Wikipedia finds it a pretty much open book, just the right thing to help tenth-graders get over their presumed dislike of or aversion to poetry. The poem is mercifully short and, according to Wikipedia, yields itself willingly to analysis.

In her superb Carnaval, Susan L. Miller’s latest poetry collection, we find the fragile intimacies of friendship and the heartbreak of their loss, as well as—among other motifs—expansive poems about Mexico’s culture and people, a country she knows well from her many travels. Mexico acts as the wellspring of Miller’s rich imagination, as in the book’s final section, Con el pincel extranjero, where we find the sequence “Birds of Mexico,” a carnivalesque tour de force drenched in particulars that go beyond showing but more toward witnessing.

Something in a literary work always remains — something heard and absorbed but not possessed, understood but not used up. When an explication is finished, the poem remains persistently and wonderfully there. I’ve closely read “Split the Lark—” many times, and I’ve realized from this ongoing experience that it contains more than I’ll ever be able to say. I couldn’t kill it even if I wanted to

I love the arts of Mexico. You can go into a city and see ancient Olmec heads in one museum, then witness extraordinary folk art in the street, and then see the work of modern and contemporary artists like Francisco Toledo or Remedios Varo or Filogonio Naxín in the local bookstore or in another museum. There’s a real appreciation for the handwork of ordinary people, and an impulse toward color and beauty everywhere. Mexicans really put that beauty into everything, high or low: home altars, oilcloth, even the little candy faces on the “bread of the dead” that my friend Delfina brought to me from Oaxaca on Día de Muertos.

Many people have written about Wendell Berry, the prolific author and agrarian advocate, since his death on August 31 this year. Berry, of course, wrote a great deal himself, leaving us much to reflect on in his many essays, poetry collections, and fiction. I’ve shared my own thoughts on his legacy elsewhere, but that assessment—like so many others—doesn’t capture the essence of the man I came to call my friend.

I was recently listening to the song Age of Consent by New Order and I was struck for maybe the first time by just how wonderful is the opening bassline. I mean, I’ve definitely noticed that bassline before. You have to notice it if you’ve ever listened to the song. It is the only thing one really hears for the first few seconds and it sets up everything else.

I was writing a book about American fraud and American violence, as exemplified by my protagonist’s experience with mass shootings—which would become leaden, unbearable, if we merely went from one shooting to the next. So for me humor worked in two ways: as a means to consider the violence without turning away; and as a way to reconsider some of our national myths, and through doing that, to laugh at ourselves.

By the end of Jane Austen’s novel “Emma”, the feeling is that Emma has truly learned her lesson and deserves happiness as much as anyone can. Because none of us is without guilt in claiming to know more than they can know. Who doesn’t have an Emma Woodhouse running around in their head?

In 2016, I became obsessed with American history and American fraud tied to commerce and religion. It seemed to me that the earliest significant English points of entry in what would become the U.S.—Jamestown and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (both taking on significant weight in American mythology; both granted legitimacy by royal charter and the establishment of corporations, the Virginia Company of London and the Massachusetts Bay Company )—these places, it seemed, could be understood as shaping various elements of our national character

I can still see it now: the blocky, squat, mass-market paperback copy of the Guinness Book of World Records on my ex-brother-in-law’s bedside table. The spine broken, the pages curled back at the corners and possibly spilled with beer, probably from being read in the bathtub or thumbed-through during an uneventful NFL game on a Sunday afternoon. Ask any kid who grew up during the 70’s and 80’s, and they will probably recall the serendipitous convenience of the Guinness Book of World Records, whether found at a relative’s house, or in a sweltering laundromat on a Sunday afternoon with Mom after the Speed Queen finally broke down.

There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.

The moment in the life of Moses that lingers most with me comes at the end, when he sees the Promised Land but is not allowed to enter it: 1 And Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo….

I grew up in a house filled with books. Many of them mysteriously old and impenetrable. Ornately bound sets of Dickens, Gibbon, Francis Parkman, Macaulay. But there, magically, sandwiched among those ancient tomes, but actually accessible to me, resided a complete series of 1900s-era boys’ books my dad and his brothers had doted on and dogeared when they were ten-year old kids like myself: the fifteen-volume Dave Porter series, “by” Edward Stratemeyer.

I’ve been listening to Erik Satie’s symphonic work—yes, I think it is something we would call a symphonic work—a piece he called Socrate. It is sort of an opera, though not really an opera exactly. It is a hybrid piece that I think he actually called a symphonic drama. Anyway, it is about Socrates. Satie took some bits of dialogue from a number of different spots in the Platonic corpus and then strung them together into a kind of sung dialogue with a musical composition in the background.

Scott Cairns’s latest poetry collection, Against Certainty, just published by Slant Books, is his twelfth book of poems. Cairns touches on many motifs in this new book—including “nous” (or the mind), travel, and his cancer. But for this post I want to focus on the major theme that runs through the collection: prayer.

I’d say that a good many poems in this book and previous books wrestle with prayer. I wouldn’t characterize my disposition as suggesting that prayer ever goes unanswered, but I would say that prayer as petition has come to seem a waste of time, and perhaps a waste of prayer. If prayer does anything, I’d say it offers brief moments of communion.

In John F. Dean’s poem “The Paltry Ego,” time teaches that experience impinges upon us and eludes comprehension. As children, we can build and “pilot” a boat; as we grow older, we encounter the unexpected, jolts to mind and nerve that alienate us from ourselves. Life is a long journey with twists and turns and complications, as is this poem, which is a single sentence we move through, negotiate, and seek to apprehend.

Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler, is centered on its own “probable impossibility,” one quieter, subtler than those in previous novels, but which proves arguably more powerful. This latest novel is astonishing not for the surprise of protagonist Daphne Fuller reuniting with her estranged stepfather, Eddie Triplett, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but for the novel’s affirmation of the endurance of gentle love through decades of absence, for its celebration of the probable impossibilities life sometimes deals us.