DAILY BLOG
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At first blush, the marriage between Ovid, that most latin of poets, and Ted Hughes would seem as unlikely a match as any you could imagine. Not in ability, of course, but in language and temperament. Hughes as a poet has always seemed to me one of the most earthy, physical, and Anglo-Saxon of all… Read more
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“Feel like breakfast?” he asked. “I could do things to a can of black coffee,” Steve admitted. “All right. But you’ll have to gulp it. Judge Denvir is waiting to get a crack at you, and the longer you keep him waiting, the tougher it’ll be for you.” (Hammett, Dashiell. Nightmare Town: Stories) Read more
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Well, five basketball stars in the past sixty years have been famous for either failing miserably in the clutch or lacking the ability to rise to the occasion: Wilt, Hayes, Malone, Ewing and Garnett. All five were famous for their fall-away/turnaround jumpers and took heat because their fall-aways pulled them out of rebounding position. If… Read more
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Silence is where poetry is born. I have long wondered if my preference for books and poetry is based in part on the fact that I was born with hearing defect and something called Central Auditory Processing Disorder. A number of surgeries and hospital stays when I was young, fixed the hearing defect. The Central… Read more
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If you grow up in the West and and do not like westerns, it is the same as if you grew up in Belgium and do not like beer. At the very least, you have proven yourself to be someone who cannot be trusted. The status that westerns have in American culture is much diminished… Read more
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Sometimes there are books I just cannot connect with. It is something that happens to me with fiction books all the time. It happens much less often with poetry books. Doubtless this is because of the way I usually choose my poetry books. With poetry, it is easy to pick of a volume, skim pages,… Read more
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When she sat down on the stool next to me she nodded toward the counterman and said, “Shorty’s got a heart of steel, mister. Won’t even trust me for a cup of joe until I get a job. Care to finance me to a few vitamins?” I was too tired to argue the point. “Make… Read more
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“…those who erect walls, as Jorge Luis Borges reminds us, can easily have books burned.” Written in 2013, Nuccio Ordine’s “little masterpiece” The Usefulness of the Useless is filled with Post-Trump aha moments like the quote above. It also dovetails into a debate being waged in the universities and colleges of America even as I… Read more
