Do you know Wallace Stevens’s poem, with its strange title, “A Postcard from the Volcano”? It’s included in Ideas of Order, published first in a limited edition in July 1935 and then in a trade edition in October 1936. I reread it recently, and I was spellbound by its first stanza, macabre and sweet, the beginning of a story about memory and imagination. The post Where is Wallace Stevens?: Close Reading “A Postcard from the Volcano” appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
On the front cover, against a mostly red background, was the white image of a seamed baseball, with the words “The Babe Ruth Story” inscribed on it. In a black box underneath it: “By Babe Ruth as Told to Bob Considine.” To the left, in vertical layout, were four small black and white photographs, showing in sequence the Babe’s mighty swing. The post Close Reading: My Story, continued appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
In this post, I’d like to share with you the story of my career as a close reader. I wonder whether your experience is anything like it. I wonder, too, whether this kind of career is possible today, in an era dominated by social media and full of suspicion and doubt about the value of the humanities. The post Becoming a Close Reader appeared first on Slant Books.| Slant Books
“I have never started a poem whose end I knew,” Robert Frost said, because “writing a poem is discovering.” But how do writers know when they’ve discovered the end? How do we know when a piece of writing is done, is the way we want it, the way it must be? Perhaps that’s why the Internet teems with advice for poets seeking counsel and support for dealing with this problem. I recall a thread that had the caption, “How the hell do I end a poem?” The post Beginning and Ending: Lou...| Slant Books
Othello’s love for Desdemona is intense and exhilarating to him, but it’s fragile, for it has come at a cost. This warrior, an older man, different in race and background, celebrates his passion for his beloved even as he wonders whether the sacrifice of his freedom was worth it. Has he given up too much, lost more than he gained? That’s Othello’s fear, the vulnerability Iago exploits.| Slant Books
Ernest Hemingway said he wrote on “the principle of the iceberg”—1/8th above the surface, 7/8th below. For him, less is more, the meanings more powerful because they’re not stated, but implied. That’s why Hemingway has been praised for his art of omission, knowing what to leave out. It’s why the novelist Anthony Burgess honored him for teaching writers “how to use the silences between words.”| 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
Here’s a poem by Yvor Winters (1900-1968), written during World War II, when California was on guard against possible attacks by the Japanese navy and air force. I’d like to lead you through this poem, and share a lesson I learned from reading and thinking about it.| Slant Books
My friend and colleague Robert Garis died in January 2001, age 75. Bob was a superb close reader, maybe the best I have ever met, vivid and exact in his responses to literature, and to film, ballet, and music as well. I admired Bob tremendously, his seriousness and intensity, and his joy too, his pleasure in being in the company of exceptional authors, composers, directors, and choreographers.| Slant Books
Thomas Hardy’s novels are well-known and widely studied, and some of them, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), have become even more popular through film and TV-miniseries adaptations. Hardy is so rewarding as a novelist, that we tend to forget he’s an outstanding poet as well. He wrote close to 1000 lyrics.| Slant Books
Professor David Ferry probed each poet’s words, noting details, asking questions about them, keeping his students focused and vigilant, pointing to a surprise, a turn in syntax, an implication in an image overlooked first time through. I never heard him speak about Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier,” but I imagine he would have discussed the brevity of the poem in relation to the large solemnity of the title, the short lines, the choice of a four-stanza structure, the relation of each...| Slant Books
It’s a pleasure to reread and analyze this first quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, looking at it and listening to it, the puzzles it generates and the questions it raises, and I am tempted to proceed to the rest of the sonnet. But in this post, I have another purpose, and that’s to quote and pay tribute to William Empson’s interpretation of the line about “choirs” in chapter 1 of his 1930 masterpiece of literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity.| 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