…I think it should be this one by Jay Parini. I’ve read quite a few, and Jay Parini’s is the only one that seems to capture the Frost I sense from Frost’s poetry and his other writings. Plus, Parini’s book … Continue reading →
…in the Bronx.* And it’s still standing, although it’s been relocated a few hundred feet, and a little park built around it. At the time Poe moved there, the Bronx was not a city. His young wife was dying of … Continue reading →
No, the poet Robert Frost didn’t write anything about the believers versus the deniers of anthropogenic global warming. After all, he died in 1963. When I started this blog (lo about nine long years ago!), I had some idea of … Continue reading →
When I was young I came across this book of courtroom speeches by Clarence Darrow. Although I was only about eleven years old it enthralled me, and I think it was one of the reasons I ended up going to … Continue reading →
Leonard Cohen is a songwriter, and a very successful one at that. But he was a poet first. He’s old, too—if 79 can be called “old” these days. Accordingly, the style and content of his songs have changed over the … Continue reading →
Will Vegas and Atlantic City go the way of Detroit? With the proliferation of other, more convenient and less-centralized gambling venues, the two cities may be doomed. Already, more than half the homes in Las Vegas are under water—and I’m … Continue reading →
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— ———–T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock David Horowitz has written a new book, although it doesn’t have … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Here’s a post I first wrote in 2005. It’s a favorite of mine.] I think it may be a lost pedagogical device, but when I was in grade school, we were forced by our teachers (mostly elderly women, as … Continue reading →
British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a complicated man, like many poets. But unlike most of them these days, he was politically of the right, at least in some respects. Larkin wrote in forms, which is inherently conservative. But his … Continue reading →
The poet Yeats often wrote about how dreadful old age was, especially its physical manifestations. In the poem “Among School Children“, he describes himself as having looked pretty nifty in youth and terrible at sixty: And I though never of … Continue reading →
[NOTE: In one of yesterday’s posts I reproduced some photos of people when young alongside the very same people considerably older. Then I offered—without any commentary—one of my favorite poems, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” by Gerard Manley … Continue reading →
Sometimes I don’t like to confront the fact of aging. Sometimes it’s okay with me (not that anyone’s asking). These before and after photos—a person young, the same person older, in the very same pose and similar clothing—are heartbreaking, heartwarming, … Continue reading →