The Dragon, the Princess, and St. George: One Story, Three Paintings, One Poem, Three Perspectives. First the Legend Behind the Paintings The most famous tale associated with St. George, as patron saint of England and champion for Christianity, is of him slaying the dragon which was terrorising the city of Silene in the province of Libya, on the day when…
Incident on Broadway Last Friday—March,bright sun, cold wind—I was on Broadway, hobbling,headed for the next block. At 109th, at the light,two men just ahead, waiting:one speaking,one being spoken at. The speaker—young, loud,a dog on a loose leash,muscular, steady— kept returning to it: Why am I an anti-Semitejust because I’m against Israelkilling people? Again: Why am I… The other man—seventies,beard, dark…
Kellings Manor, Wiltshire. January 1935. The snow is closing in. THE SEASLOTH REVIEW is pleased to offer readers the first chapter of Lauden McVey’s Death Comes to Kellings ahead of publication by Barbeque Books. An incomplete manuscript has been found among the papers of Lauden McVey — one of the great Queens of Crime, some said better than Christie, better…
A Postal Worker with the BEF in 1940 In my hand I hold a small pocket diary for the year 1940, printed for gardeners by the Royal Horticultural Society. Its pages offer advice on pruning fruit trees, planting seedlings, and preparing the soil for spring. Yet in the blank spaces between that advice the diary records something very different: the…
Has This Happened To You? If you go to art museums and galleries you will probably recognize this. You leave the Met, say, and step back out into the world of Fifth Avenue and everything is changed. This happened to me most memorably leaving the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney. His urban landscape was suddenly there, as if Gansevoort…
A neighbor recommended an Off-Broadway play: Douglas Lackey’s Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler. We saw it last Saturday. In one memorable scene, concentration camp prisoners are ordered to sing the Horst Wessel Nazi anthem”Die Fahne hoch,” ( “Raise the Flag”), in celebration of Hitler’s birthday. Instead, Litten leads them in the defiant German folk song “Die Gedanken sind…
Encouraged by Elizabeth at The Skeptic’s Kaddish and #W3199 to engage in a little self-love, I wasted no time in penning a few brief and modest lines of self-praise. ~~~~~ It is a sonnet. But truly, it was hard to keep it so short. An epic saga would be more fitting, as there is just so very much for which…
Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth” is a poem for the weary. Not for the triumphant, nor for the newly inspired, but for those who have begun to fear that their effort may be pointless. Clough does not begin with triumph. He begins with correction: Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are…
Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (1935) delivers a compact, satisfying Hercule Poirot mystery with a mid-flight murder in an airliner en route from Paris to Croydon. With no passing tramp to blame and eleven passengers and crew sealed aloft, the crime unfolds in a true closed circle – the sort of setup that promises ingenuity, and the exercise of…
An iambic perambulation to secure essential supplies in adverse conditions spurred by Pounding the Pentameter and based on true facts! (See weather screenshots below.) A Winter Expedition Upon a bitter weekend’s iron freeze, We ventured forth where Broadway sidewalks run. The need for apples, yoghurt, toothpaste, cheese Compelled our steps beneath a leaden sun. The wind, a blade, sliced keenly…
When Herman Melville began writing poetry, even his wife treated it as faintly embarrassing: “Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.” – Elizabeth Melville in a letter to her mother in1859 regarding her husband’s shift from fiction to poetry. That mixture of shame and dismissal has a name:…
The Inventory of After The Britannica sits on the shelf, volume S gone, a gap where the history of salt once lived. The silent engine of the fridge buzzing in the kitchen at 4 a.m., a single spoon in the sink: a monument to a meal unshared. You look for a sign and get instead the clogged sink and the…
Politicians seem to have shrunk. My brother and I were chuntering about it recently: how the figures we grew up with appeared more substantial, some even approaching the once-serious idea of statesmanship – a word that now feels faintly antique. Of course, the world was different. Times change, and so do our perceptions. Still, one tangible difference was that many…
Read the guidelines for W3 #192 at the Skeptic’s Kaddish METAPHYSICAL POEM by Frank O’Hara When do you want to go I’m not sure I want to go there where do you want to go any place I think I’d fall apart any place else well I’ll go if you really want to I don’t particularly care but you’ll fall…
In 1903, when Josephine Herbst was six years old, her mother took her four daughters on a reduced-fare train ride to Portland, Oregon. We lived in Sioux City, Iowa, and we might have been dropped accidentally by some great auk on a transcontinental flight, so unreasonable it seemed that we were stranded in the middle of a country that offered…