I don’t know the desert. I’ve slept in a palm-branch hut, rented for $1 a night from a Bedouin, by the Red Sea in the Sinai Peninsula when it was under Israeli control. I’ve spent hours in a broken down Jeep waiting for help somewhere in the Sinai. I’ve watched the sunrise from atop Masada in the Judean Desert. Just a few weeks ago, I visited Joshua Tree National Park, where two deserts, the Mojave and the Colorado, meet.| Slant Books
Ever since I first read Pattiann Rogers’s poem “On the Way to Early Morning Mass” (in her 2001 collection Song of the World Becoming), I’ve been enthralled by it. But I haven’t tried to move through it slowly, line by line. That’s what I want to do in this post.| Slant Books
September 17, eight days before the Asheville storm, my wife and I left town. First stop, D.C. to visit our son and his partner. Next stop, New Rochelle, N.Y. to visit our daughter and her boys. Monday, September 30, the day after a “Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry” retreat for the board and staff in Manhattan: head home. Settle back just in time for the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. That was the plan.| Slant Books
The literary critic Stanley Fish has lamented that when poets are not taught in classrooms, they cease to exist. That’s extreme, but there’s some truth to it, and among modern American poets, a case in point is Robinson Jeffers. He’s rarely on syllabi, and it has been this way for a long time. But at his best, Jeffers is a powerful Nature poet. He’s well worth reading, studying, and learning from.| Slant Books
On this upcoming family camping trip, there are so many things I should be reading. But what do I want to read? It must be something best consumed in brief snippets. I may take a volume of R H Blyth’s haiku translations. But even that is too much in the way of commentary (brilliant though it is) when what I want is something pared down to essentials, something crystalline, elemental, vivid, this-worldly. The only narrative I’m interested in is that of travel in this world.| Slant Books
This list is based partly on some reading I’ve been doing for a novel project now drawing near completion. Two themes govern the list. The more fun theme is that of adventure, romance, epic, enchantment—in a word, fantasy. The equally profound and urgent, if less obviously exciting theme, is that of georgics or the literary tradition that celebrates the cultivation of the earth, as well as its beauty and mystery and terror.| Slant Books
For my birthday, my sister sent me The Carrying, the 2018 collection of poems by Ada Limón, current U.S. Poet Laureate. I hadn't read Limón's poetry before, and found that getting to know it was very moving. The poems drew me into themselves, into the depths of Limón's recurrent joys and concerns.| Slant Books
There’s a mistake I sometimes make in my close reading of literature. In the classroom work I’m doing, or in the essay I’m writing, I tend to interpret the words, lines, and sentences at the beginning and the middle from the vantage point of the end. I know where the poem or piece of prose has concluded, and I project what I have come to know into what I had earlier read.| Slant Books
