The genteel word “readers” is inadequate for the condition in which we self-declared readers find ourselves. “Consumers,” on the other hand, seems to me a better fit for the current moment. That word has become something of a catch-all, used ruefully to term any group, from college students to church members, who act entitled to receive something without any effort.
Hassan reads these books in Arabic translations but wants to read them in German, “the original they were written in.” He prefers to read slowly, thinking carefully about each sentence before moving to the next one. He looks forward to sections where it’s difficult to figure out the meaning. This pleases him, he explained, “it’s fun, stretching my mind.”
A day before the start of Yom Kippur, my friend Aviya Kushner, brilliant poet and writer, posted on her Substack a piece on the great poet Yehuda Halevi (1075 – 1141) and the relevance of his work to Yom Kippur. That’s what inspired me to read, during the few hours away from synagogue, a little Halevi. The first poem of Halevi’s I landed on is “Heal Me, Lord.”
I’ve been reaching into my poetry shelves to take out poets I haven’t read in decades. This week it was Theodore Roethke’s turn. Browsing his six poetry collections, I of course find an abundance of themes: his childhood and relation to his father, love of a woman, various dimensions of the self, and more. But the poems I’m most drawn to are the ones where he expresses what I’d call his mysticism— his longing for and then union with the divine.
In the Preface to The Drunken Silenus (2020), the first volume of Morgan Meis’s “Three Paintings Trilogy”—which continues with The Fate of the Animals (2022), and culminates in the just published The Grand Valley—Meis tells us why he wrote this first book: “I was working on a style.”
I got interested in captivity narratives when I first read Mary Rowlandson’s in a graduate class. (Captivity narratives are the personal stories of those who have been captured by an enemy. Sarah’s voice in this story is one of those.) Mary Rowlandson was an English colonist who was captured by Native people in 1675 during King Philip’s War and held for ransom. Her account became what was really the first American bestseller.
There is a famous story amongst Assyriologists. It concerns a man named George Smith, who was working at the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century but who was by no means someone you’d expect to be working at the British Museum and studying and deciphering cuneiform tablets since he was, in fact, born in working class circumstances in London in 1840, and managed, somehow, to teach himself to read Akkadian and Sumerian, which anyone who has ever looked at a cuneiform tablet will realize is not such an easy thing to do.
Sometimes illumination comes to us from a single word. This recently happened to me when I was reading the Gospel of Luke and encountered this verse from the Passion narrative, about Pilate, Barabbas, and Jesus: “And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will.” (KJV 23:25) It’s the deadly precision of “will” that makes the sentence disturbing.
Norman Fischer is an influential American Zen-Buddhist, a poet and writer, and a Jew. He wrote Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms after spending a week with the Trappist monks at Gethsemani Abbey, where he experienced for the first time the Christian monastic practice of daily recitation of the psalms. Troubled by “the violence, passion, and bitterness” expressed in some of the psalms but recognizing the power they held for the monks, Fischer decided to investigate the psalms by creating his own versions of some of them.
Virginity is on trial here, and virginity’s crime is…? Tolentino summarizes one writer’s terms for it: “that celibacy had lately doubled among people in their early twenties.” As if virginity is metastasizing like cancer or multiplying like rabbits. Then Tolentino quotes another writer who gives the offense an economic spin by calling it a “sex recession,” as if virginity were the fall-out from bad investments.
When my neighbor, composer David Liptak, was visiting earlier in the summer. I asked what he was currently composing, and he said, “I’ve set two poems by Marianne Moore: ‘The Fish’ and ‘A Jelly-Fish.’” I wasn’t familiar with Moore’s poems, so I immediately got from the library Becoming Marianne More: The Early Poems, 1907-1924, and turned to David’s two poems.
Like the other two books in your trilogy, The Grand Valley focuses on a single work of art—in this case, it’s fair to say, on a series of paintings. The artist is Joan Mitchell, who many people may not have heard of. Can you give us a “teaser” for the book—why is this artist worth paying attention to?
Do you know Wallace Stevens’s poem, with its strange title, “A Postcard from the Volcano”? It’s included in Ideas of Order, published first in a limited edition in July 1935 and then in a trade edition in October 1936. I reread it recently, and I was spellbound by its first stanza, macabre and sweet, the beginning of a story about memory and imagination.
It’s no longer the student who’s shocked by the unwelcome demands made on him or her by the first writing assignment. It’s the teacher who’s shocked, this time by the question of what’s to be done with the result, since it wasn’t the student who wrote the paper, but a computer. But if today’s English teachers are shocked at getting “perfect themes” because AI is writing them, why are they giving assignments for which “perfect themes” are the correct responses?
It has now, in 2025, been almost twenty years since the publication of The Year of Magical Thinking, writer Joan Didion’s prickly, spare nonfiction account of her husband’s unexpected death during New Year’s week in 2003. It arrived in the mail on a day I was home sick from work, and I lay in bed with my head pounding and read the whole thing within hours.
It’s a dark poem; that’s for sure. Yet throughout, the poetry itself lessens the darkness. That recurring “have it,” the regular meter, the rhymings throughout (especially that “spaces”/“race is”), the alliterations, —these (to my mind) lighten the gloom. The poem is at once playful and deeply unsettling. Frost, in his mastery, truly has it both ways.
On the front cover, against a mostly red background, was the white image of a seamed baseball, with the words “The Babe Ruth Story” inscribed on it. In a black box underneath it: “By Babe Ruth as Told to Bob Considine.” To the left, in vertical layout, were four small black and white photographs, showing in sequence the Babe’s mighty swing.
In the poem “Exile for the Sake of Redemption,” Yehoshua November dares to bring the Divine down to earth. This suggests that it is up to us as it is to God to “engage in activities that we imagine will enrich our future.” Teaching and learning are two of those activities. Poetry—writing and reading it—is another.
If you polled every last person in the world, I’m sure you’d find that, at one point or another, they’ve written a poem. Not the Haiku assigned in third grade. I’m thinking of the visceral thing composed on the edge of love. Maybe it’s never written down but goes on shaking about, caged in a dusty corner of the mind.
Utilitarian reading (AI) considers words as symbols referring only to other symbols like them. Words are therefore interchangeable, fungible—place holders for each other. AI obligingly sorts the symbols so as to condense and summarize them. By contrast, close reading offers not an answer but a presence. Words are not fungible tokens but embodiments of a speaker’s voice. In utilitarian reading we SEE the words. In close reading we HEAR them, and behind those spoken words someone speaking them.