In an intriguing article in The New York Times this week Douglas Quenqua writes about “unfriending” and “defriending” on Facebook, the web-based social network. It’s odd how Internet terminology focuses our minds on elusive phenomena. Few things have troubled me more in life than the sudden and unaccountable loss of a friendship. I’m sure I [...]
Read More...“War on terror” is a cheap slogan. Try “war on fundamentalism.” Scary, huh? That would mean war on Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, too. Not just those awful Islamists. And it would be much more to the historic point, but heaven knows we don’t want to get to the point where we would actually have to [...]
Read More...I think with my feet. Better on pavement than turf. I stop under awnings or dodge into cafés to scribble. I share this habit with a long line of walking writers: William Wordsworth (Dickens would have made up that name if William hadn’t already nabbed it), Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hardy, to name a few. [...]
Read More...Congress made itself irrelevant to public discourse by selling ideologies instead of examining ideas. Obscured in Barack Obama’s triumph is the triumph of digital communications: the people went around their leaders to engage in the discourse a servile, self-absorbed media establishment refused to host. The people went around their leaders just as their leaders have [...]
Read More...A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not stake their own. —H.G. Wells (1866-1946) We used to [...]
Read More...The front page of a newspaper or the home page of a web site is a showcase, and like all showcases it’s not a guarantor of what is most significant. It offers up either what’s hot or what the editors would like to be hot. But ideas that shape a century often languish in the [...]
Read More...Smart phones need poems. Apple, Palm, BlackBerry, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, Kyocera —all of you—listen up. You have the perfect medium. Talk to Graywolf, Milkweed, Norton, Copper Canyon and the many other presses devoted to poetry. Stand up for literacy and poetry. If music can make it into your strategies, so can poetry. Oh, and by [...]
Read More...Americans and Australians, among English speakers, are hot shots, expressionists, conjurers. They believe there is no limit to the jobs language can be called on to do. Just as they rolled back geographic frontiers, the Americans and Aussies keep pushing language to its limits and find none. This is by no means to say that [...]
Read More...My days as a high school orator and debater soured me on performed poetry. Maybe growing up among artists had something to do with this bias, too. I trust what I can see. For this reason I don’t attend as many poetry readings as a poet needing to attract readers should. I’m acutely aware of [...]
Read More...Even when I sit on park benches posing as an innocuous gaffer I’m engaged in a dangerous project: I’m trying to integrate my experiences as a newspaperman with my sensibility as a poet. Notice I say “as a poet,” because I’m reluctant to cop to a poetic sensibility, which is another thing entirely. Old people [...]
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