Lines of Thinking

Beyond the surging signs of spring, April is also national poetry month AND the beginning of baseball season. It’s a double header of the best sort.

At 101 Lawrence Ferlinghetti had outlived his era-mates by many years. That, it occurred to me, may have been bittersweet: the deepening saturation of truth and beauty “happily amid complexity and paradox” and the physical absence of those we write and make for.

Poems that help us see red—these are what I delight in sending to you on a snow-blown afternoon from Yellow Springs.

One of my most satisfying interludes with poetry involved “wrapping” an entire 65,000-square-foot building in a poem by Arthur Rimbaud.

The Japanese poet and diarist Sei Shonagon noted among the tricks of time and distance the deceptive proximity of the last day of the year and the first day of the new year: things that were near and far at the same moment.

Jubilation abounded in many places last Saturday when the 2020 presidential election was called for Joe Biden. Spontaneous and lighthearted, it brought back to me lines from Maya Angelou’s deeply voiced verse “On the Pulse Of Morning” from the 1993...

Just today I awoke to the news that Louise Glück had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. “Wonderful,” I thought. As I was already planning for this month’s offering to share some lines of translation from Seamus Heaney, who received the...

These days, I am more mindful of dichotomies I have drawn and leveled falsely over time. Often they seem to reside in dismissive (and unnecessary) judgments about situations and people, rationalized by fact-lite narratives I construct for them. They...

For some time, since coming to Yellow Springs, I’ve been thinking about Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was from nearby Dayton. There was a Dunbar high school in my hometown of Baltimore, as there are in many if not most major cities across the country....

(This is an entry I started thinking about six months ago. I put it aside for various reasons, not all of which were clear to me then, and some of which only showed themselves long since.) Some things disappear for a while, or they seem to. Thoughts...