In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines and websites, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. In honor of Mother’s Day, this week we have posts by and about literary mothers.
Is Mother’s Day not your thing? You might be interested in this list of “The Meanest Moms in Literature.”
For those of us with lovely mothers, we’ll end with Albert Cohen’s essay on “My Mother’s Love” from The Paris Review.
As Albert Cohen puts it, “Toothless or not, strong or weak, young or old, our mothers love us. And the weaker we are, the more they love us. Our mothers’ incomparable love.”
The first poetry anthology I owned was How to Eat A Poem: A Smorgasbord of Tasty and Delicious Poems for Young Readers. The title still gives me the giggles, though my amusement is perhaps more nuanced—as a kid, I delighted in the simple silliness of the concept; now, the idea of “eating” a poem seems…
“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.” —Wallace Stevens I think about writing more than I actually write. I think about writing when I wake up in the morning, how I should dash to my computer and type up whatever thoughts I had just dreamed about to make sense of it all….
Some of you would accuse me of never having had any formal instruction in Latin. Some of you would be correct! If you crack open an issue of a nationally distributed literary magazine these days, you’re unlikely to see a lot of traditional sonnets, villanelles, ballads, or other formal poetry that at one time dominated…