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.
