For if ever you are in danger of feeling a wave of quite unreasonable cheerfulness descend, here is a simple antidote: The Three Miseries This is the key to misery It opens its miserable door Attendants glum & gloom greet you half way You bring your fears you call a number They provide the tissues This other key is for…
I take my title from the South African poet Roy Campbell (1901–1957), who knew a thing or two about lovers and haters. It’s from Georgian Spring, in which Campbell lampooned his fellow poets for their cosy triteness: New quarterlies relume their yellow covers, Anthologies on every bookshelf sing. The publishers put on their best apparel To sell the public everything…
In the Kitchen, Where I Lay My Scene Upon the counter where I lay my scene— (Do join me, if your hands are clean). From tamarind I strip the shell, And pluck the seeds that there do dwell. A curry brews—a fragrant blend Of cumin, garlic, spice to send A spark upon the waiting tongue. Here, have some wine—both crisp…
A cold, wet February day – perfect backdrop for a journey into Romanticism—off on the M4 bus to the Met to see Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature The exhibit is there until May 11, 2025 so if you are in NYC it’s highly recommended. To whet your interest – or to compensate if you can’t visit – there is…
Most of us have done it at some point or another – accidentally locked ourselves out of the house. Raymond Carver’s poem tells a quite simple ordinary story but it becomes so much more. Read it to see what he does. He’s locked himself out and of course it’s raining and the people who have the spare key are away.…
The 2024 harvest moon is September 17th. First a poem courtesy of the Daily Poem at The Paris Review – from August 28. Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down. Only the night is wound up tight. And ticking with unpaused breath. Sweet night, sweet, steady, reliable,…
As always, one thing leads to another. This time it’s the post from Gert Loveday’s Fun With Books that highlights Elizabeth Bishop’s tribute to her friend Robert Lowell – her poem North Haven .You can read it here Elizabeth Bishop Islands are Beautiful In an interview, Bishop spoke of North Haven – an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine: I sometimes…
One thing leads to another. How do you get from the Daily Poem in the Paris Review to a re-read of The Loved One and an exploding portable toilet courtesy of Evelyn Waugh? Here’s the Annmarie Drury poem that caught my attention: Walking in Hills of Which One Has Seen Many Paintings Your task differs: to leave the world to…
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings. Julius Caesar Act 1 scene 2. There are those who agree with Cassius that we are in charge of our own destiny And then there are those like T.S.Eliot better grounded in reality who understand that we are all at the mercy of mysteries…
One Last week IntrepidEd News published another of my pieces. This one is about how schools are on the front line of the political and emotional turmoil of these times. The world is in crisis and schools are in the middle of it. Schools are on the front line in an emotionally charged space where existential threats amplify parental worries…
I’m launched on a Wittgenstein project. I thought it was about time I knew more about him and his work than the odd anecdote and the quotation beloved by English teaching theorists: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Any Wittgensteinian folks out there with words of advice? All thoughts welcome. I’m easing my way in…
In 1913, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West” 1921 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the German Albert…
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ Alice laughed. “There’s no use…
I chanced upon this painting of the meeting between Galileo and John Milton and had a flashback to undergraduate days and the anthology we were required to buy and lug around (and possibly read.) It was American, very heavy, very expensive, and full of all kinds of interesting but rather dense texts. I remember the pages were flimsy thin, and…
In his day, the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’ was something of an international rock star whose readings could fill sports stadiums. He was one of those A-List literati who make the front pages. His poem Lies was much anthologized in English teaching materials in the years following its publication in the Soviet Literary journal Novy Mir in 1959. The kind…