DAILY BLOG
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“…there are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.” ~W.H. Auden When I was in college, I had to make a choice one semester between taking Romantic Literature or Victorian Literature. Knowing just enough about everything to get myself into trouble, I chose to take Victorian Literature. Romantic… Read more
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For close to 30 years, I have had a habit of writing, editing, and rewriting just about everyday: poetry, journaling, fiction, and blogging. I go through phases where I will send some of it out to contests or for publication. Occasionally I have had someone choose to publish something I have written. These are featured… Read more
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Robert Frost is the most American of all American poets. He is American in subject, sound, and sensibility. It is his great strength and his greatest weakness. While Whitman’s propheticness transcended his American-ness, Frost can make no such claim to a transcendent universality. In the end he remains Poet Americanus. That is what makes this volume of essays… Read more
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Segmenting time, or periodization, is something we have to do if we want to organize the past and give it meaning. But it’s dangerous. By choosing some dominating event and saying that its period starts here and ends there, we run the risk of neglecting other events that don’t fit well into the scheme we’ve… Read more
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We inherit from our parents much that flows beneath the surface of our immediate awareness: temperment, personality, ways of looking at and moving through the world. My mother watched virtually no television and only occasionally went to movies or watched them on tv. One movie that she did love though was Doctor Zhivago. She also loved… Read more
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The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins has been on my To-Be-Read List for a very long time. Considered to be one of the earliest Detective Novels, it is also a regular on lists of the greatest English novels ever written. It is also quite big, 700-800 pages! Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I downloaded the… Read more
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I have reached a place in my reading life where I am trying to fill-in some gaps. Reading some of the classic writers and books deemed important or foundational that I have not yet got around to reading. Anthony Trollope is one such writer. After his death, Henry James, who was not always a fan,… Read more
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More than any poet, I associate Auden with mountains because that is where I first seriously read him. I carried a volume of his selected poems into the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness when I worked trail crew there for the United States Forest Service during summers in the early 1980s. In the evenings, after everyone else went… Read more
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The best quote I know about the fickle nature of affection comes from W.B. Yeats. Quoting his father, who may very well have been quoting Balzac, Yeats wrote: “A man does not love a woman because he thinks her clever or because he admires her, but because he likes the way she has of scratching… Read more
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Ireland, pound for pound, has created more great writers than any other county on earth, especially poets. Irish poet Paula Meehan and I have one thing in common. We both lived for a while and went to school in Cheney, Washington. Paula was there for grad school at Eastern Washington University. I was there for… Read more
ClimbingSky 