I. The Romantics were right. Gothic buildings are best seen in ruin: sky-sprung clerestories in wild brambles — bare ruin’d quires — Romanesque arches reconstructed by the mind, tumbled-over stones to stumble on in a field of grey violets, in a place you can no longer drive to. When I walk by the Neo-Gothic duPont…
She turned into the drawing-room for privacy, but Henry and Eleanor had likewise retreated thither, and were at that moment deep in consultation about her. She drew back, trying to beg their pardon, but was, with gentle violence, forced to return . . . —Northanger Abbey When Henry and his sister Eleanor brought Miss Morland…
For those who are neither hero of myth nor witness to history: remember all life is holy. In the year of the blizzard in the month of February I have traipsed up the middle of Lexington Avenue, a spectacular middle passage in the snow to my own poetry reading: James Wright, Philip Levine, each having…
Because of the shabby character of the boy's mother, and also that of the man she had married the very day she found herself legally divorced and able to marry again, and because the two had determined to live far away from New Hampshire without even bothering to send him their address until several years…
Mr. Larkin’s picture is on the back. Lowell poses on the front of the jacket. Mr. Larkin’s glasses distort his eyes. Lowell doesn’t seem to be wearing his. Mr. Larkin is rather nicely dressed. Lowell’s collar is open, showing chest hair. Mr. Larkin, trying quite hard to smile, asks us, “Did you like my poems…
There is nothing like distance to create objectivity, and exclusion gives rise to counter values. —Ralph Ellison You greet me as “brother,” evocations of Sterling Brown and Ralph Bunche and Martin Luther King, Jr. who sat in your apartment after the Nobel ceremonial hectoring of Vietnam and world order, the great diameter of poverty. Your…
(for Quincy Troupe) Harlem is on parade recalling St. Louis as if like us the whole scene has been transplanted here Sanford White’s window offers remnants of James Van derZee’s world it is filled with urgent gospels infecting us both with memories of our common birthplace I see you take notes always the poet but…
Pool tables always reminded me of paintings by Tanguy— objects connected to each other by shadows on an uncertain ground. I would stare down the shaft of light on the stick, distracted by the desire to lie down on the green moss of the table, the desire to treat the balls as gently as eggs…
for Katherine Who knows why we talk of death this evening, warm beyond the measure of breath; it will be cool tomorrow for in the waters off Long Beach my brother’s ashes still collect the flowers of my mother and father, my sister dropped in the vase of a face they made of old places,…
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