It wasn’t my grandfather’s. He lectured at Tremont Hall On a snowy night. As a starter—just to break the ice—he cracked: “I’m glad the both of you could come.” There wasn’t even scattered laughter In the half empty house. After his peroration And after he had swept off back stage His Prince Albert skirts Breezing…
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and…
For whom do I speak, now, so far away from home? For whom do I write, now, so far away from myself? I speak for the experience of the flux I’ve become; I write for the concrete to fill in the distances from the house on the road I lived on, from the warm home…
I first read Howl when I was a freshman in college. I thought that it was profound and disturbing, until a respected teacher asked me why all freshmen seemed to read Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Kahlil Gibran. I quit all three. Since then (like most people) I've got comfortable with A Supermarket in California and America;…
“I was Latin, born to a noble Tuscan; Guiglielm Aldobrandesco was my father, though you, perhaps, have never heard his name. The gallant deeds and antique pedigree of my forebears fostered an insolence so great that I ignored our common mother and held all men in scorn, persisting till I died of it—as know the…
The Puritan, like a memento mori grinning from a mirror, is still among us. Relentlessly, he reminds himself and us of our longings to shatter his image with the possibility of rebirth, of conversion, of utter transformation. But now, after tens of generations of staring stubbornly into himself, as if into the white night of…
“You can be so inconsiderate.” ”You are too sensitive.” “Then why don’t you take my feelings into consideration?” ”If you weren’t so sensitive it wouldn’t matter.” * * * “You seem to really care about me only when you want me to do something for you.” ”You do…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Frank Bidart Associate Editors Lloyd Schwartz Robert Pinsky CONTRIBUTORS FRANK BIDART'S first book is Golden State (Braziller, 1973); the second, The Book of the Body, will appear next year. ELIZABETH BISHOP now lives in Boston and teaches at Harvard. She is preparing a book…
You live among the remnants of an ancient civilization that has left behind it an intricate system of canals and waterways. No one understands the books and rituals your ancestors handed down to you, but somehow everybody assumes that it must be necessary to maintain the waterways to irrigate the rice crop. Only at the…
No products in the cart.