. There are few poems that move me as much. In its avid desire to reclaim from the fire all of particularity, “the smallest color of the smallest day,” it simply burns. Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day BY DELMORE SCHWARTZ Calmly we walk through this April’s day, Metropolitan poetry here and there, In the […]
Nothing Doing
. Cosmologist Laurence Kruass’s latest book is A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Originally intended to contain a foreword by Christopher Hitchens, the book makes bold to tackle through physics a question to which religion has historically provided the comforting answer and over which contemporary philosophy long ago dismissively threw […]
A Günter Grass Manifesto
. Ezra Pound is noted, finally, for living the last decade of his life – after his indictment for treasonous, antisemitic broadcasts in support of Mussolini, and his confinement to the asylum of St. Elizabeth’s – in near silence. “I know nothing at all…. I have even forgotten the name of that Greek philosopher who […]
Eating Poetry (XXXIII) – Left Behind
. An Elegy: December, 1970 Edgar Bowers Almost four years, and, though I merely guess What happened, I can feel the minutes’ rush Settle like snow upon the breathless bed— And we who loved you, elsewhere, ignorant. From my deck, in the sun, I watch boys ride Complexities of wind and wet and wave: Pale […]
Eating Poetry (XXXII) – The Ecstasy of Unreasoning Happiness
. Patricia Hampl’s fine essay in the spring The American Scholar, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Essays From the Edge, surveys the background to Fitzgerald‘s “The Crack Up” essays, published in Esquire in 1936. She finds in the controversial product of Fitzgerald’s attempt to write himself back from personal and authorial oblivion a meeting point in consciousness between poetry and […]