Lines of Thinking

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...

At year’s end, I experience a heightened awareness of time and light and their interplay. The low-slung sun moves over the edge of the backyard fence; it beams through an otherwise innocuous container on the windowsill, casting a light shadow of...

Lines of thinking easily ride the river of consciousness, below or above our level of awareness. Talk about live streaming! When the proverbial dots are connected, if they are at all, we may see patterns and relationships in our lives that appear...

“Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.You must make your own map.” —Joy Harjo The notion of mapmaking while journeying is potent for me. Whitman and Eliot draw upon it; Strand, Rich, Bishop and Frost as well; and Homer,...