Essays

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 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.

We are equal in our mortality: mother, father, me, you, bosses, employees, friends, strangers, enemies. Enemies: I have a hard time believing that anyone is an enemy. A competitor, yes. Wealthier than I am, yes. More talented than I am, yes. More accomplished than I am, yes. Smarter than I am, yes. Jealousy, envy, self-doubt: that’s what I feel when I see others this way.

Thomas Hardy’s novels are well-known and widely studied, and some of them, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), have become even more popular through film and TV-miniseries adaptations. Hardy is so rewarding as a novelist, that we tend to forget he’s an outstanding poet as well. He wrote close to 1000 lyrics.

Juturna’s is one of the bravest laments I’ve ever read in Classical literature. And it’s one I’d never come across until a year or so ago when I decided, after too many years of delay, to read all of Virgil’s Aeneid, from beginning to end, in Latin. Alas, my Latin was and remains very rusty. But rustiness can be an advantage. It’s slowed my reading down, forcing me to dig deeply into each passage and savor it, with the result that details stay in my mind much more firmly.

Since October 7, 2023, the world has been focused on the Holy Land. And not in a positive or hopeful way. So what better time for Bret Lott’s latest book—Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land—to come out? As he notes in his foreword, Lott delivered the manuscript to his publisher in the summer of 2023, when it was possible to find in Israel the subtitle’s “hope.” And find it he does.

This list is based partly on some reading I’ve been doing for a novel project now drawing near completion. Two themes govern the list. The more fun theme is that of adventure, romance, epic, enchantment—in a word, fantasy. The equally profound and urgent, if less obviously exciting theme, is that of georgics or the literary tradition that celebrates the cultivation of the earth, as well as its beauty and mystery and terror.

The most amazing thing happened to me in the past few weeks. It was the kind of thing that I thought might never happen to me in exactly the same way, ever again: I fell in love with a book. The book was a novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha, originally published in 2020.

This year’s first seder: with strangers. Not exactly strangers. Poets. I knew the work of a few of them. One is a dear friend. Two spouses, one of whom is my wife. Sitting down at the diaspora seder table—(diaspora Jews hold two seders; Israeli Jews, one)—,I assumed most if not all of the twelve of us were Jews. Strangers? Not exactly.

Professor David Ferry probed each poet’s words, noting details, asking questions about them, keeping his students focused and vigilant, pointing to a surprise, a turn in syntax, an implication in an image overlooked first time through. I never heard him speak about Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier,” but I imagine he would have discussed the brevity of the poem in relation to the large solemnity of the title, the short lines, the choice of a four-stanza structure, the relation of each stanza to the next, even the punctuation.

Our mouths, our words, can be used for good or ill, to liberate or enslave, to bless or curse or encourage, to ask difficult questions. We share our stories, so others might be invited to tell their stories in turn, allowing us to not simply scream at and past each other but to see what values we might hold in common, to perhaps one day even arrive at a place of mutual understanding and esteem.

The poetic bookends which span thirty years of Robert Lowell’s life’s work, the first poem of Lord Weary’s Castle, “The Exile’s Return,” and the last poem of Day by Day, “Epilogue,” have a lot to say to us today. Considered together, they shed light not only on Lowell’s development as a poet, but also on what it means to be possessed by a religious-artistic vision.

In Commonwealth, Patchett does her storytelling in a way that captures how things in our own lives jumble in our minds. She has managed in this novel to create, in a most engaging way, a story—no, multiple stories—that feel uncannily true to the ways that we experience life.

It’s a pleasure to reread and analyze this first quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, looking at it and listening to it, the puzzles it generates and the questions it raises, and I am tempted to proceed to the rest of the sonnet. But in this post, I have another purpose, and that’s to quote and pay tribute to William Empson’s interpretation of the line about “choirs” in chapter 1 of his 1930 masterpiece of literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity.

Mother is gone, but compassion is still here. “[T]his encircling compassion,” Brian Volck calls it, rachamim, in his as-of-yet unpublished poem “A Goy’s Guide to TANAKH Hebrew: Rachamim.” Tanakh is the acronym for Torah (The Five Books of Moses), which with Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings), are the three major parts that make up the Hebrew Bible.

For my birthday, my sister sent me The Carrying, the 2018 collection of poems by Ada Limón, current U.S. Poet Laureate. I hadn’t read Limón’s poetry before, and found that getting to know it was very moving. The poems drew me into themselves, into the depths of Limón’s recurrent joys and concerns.

I was meeting my mother at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My mother is both a great lover of art and completely unpretentious about it. Often, she simply stands in front of objects of art and smiles. We found ourselves in an exhibit entitled Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting. We were both suddenly astonished. I don’t know why exactly. I do know why un-exactly. The paintings are extraordinary.

For me, as an author of fiction who takes inspiration from a historian like Francis Parkman, perhaps the most salient of Parkman’s features is his prose style. Few can match his cadences and powers of description. The ability to describe a scene vividly is an underestimated and for the most part a modern virtue of the prose writer; in an age of screens it has fallen into abeyance.

Students know lots of poems—songs from Disney films, lyrics written by Taylor Swift and other popular composers and performers, songs from Broadway musicals, hymns sung at church, Beatles tunes, rap and hip-hop…. But that’s not the same thing as the poetry that students are assigned to read and write about in college courses.