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Early in April of 1784, behind the grime-streaked walls of King’s Bench Prison in south London, a twenty-nine-year-old Charlotte Smith received news of her first publication. The poet wasn’t locked away on her own account. When Charlotte was fifteen, her father had arranged for her marriage to Benjamin Smith, the twenty-three-year-old son of a successful…
“Is there a poetry of peace?” asked the poet Denise Levertov in her 1989 essay, “Poetry and Peace: Some Broader Dimensions,” only to answer in that very essay: “No.” After all, how can there be a poetry of something that was never deeply experienced, never deeply felt? She claimed that, like a poem, peace cannot…
Olivia curtailed her sleeping hours to fix what’s wrong some weeks before her trip. Okay, she admits on the page, it’s been a one-month slog with VISA through salons. Last night, anonymous friend and she, in lace, race to a corner where someone shouts out a window, “Congratulations.” They call back, “We’re married but…
Coyote howls outside the patio door. 3 a.m. and someone’s out of bed turning on lights, checking windows and rain starting to sound against the skylights. When we stirred the creature vanished. Isn’t that the way even here at the cusp of the arroyo? Just as when the lizard with its stumpy tail…
First a warm blanket and a voice called Joy. Then oxygen, a faint smell, and a finger monitor. A stick at the wrist and pressure, a clear-coil tube. Then a voice called Tan and something pumped. And a thick paper packet like a vest with an eye hole. Then nothing but every-colored wallpaper…
I have long admired the immediacy and spontaneity that merges with a distancing tone of voice in the poetry of Hilda Raz—that ability she has to tell something of the everyday and make it tough, to move through the discursive to imagistic lyric all in one poem, and especially across books. It’s that “I’m as…
At first, I meant to write a treatise on happiness, but only as a kind of anti-history. —Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women Recently, I’ve had a case of Anita Brookner-itis—by which I mean a propensity to read and reread her twenty-four novels despite the aching sadness they leave in the pit of my stomach. Given…
In November 1962, Stevie Smith received a letter from “an addict…a desperate Smith-addict.” The importunate admirer inquired as to how she might get hold of Smith’s elusive first novel (having just completed her own) and hoped to arrange a meeting “over tea or coffee” in London, where she was planning to move in the new…
Every spring since 1923, thousands of playgoers have attended an open-air performance known as the Ramona Pageant in the San Jacinto foothills near Hemet, California. Mexican music echoes throughout the natural amphitheater as Native Americans dance and chant, the US cavalry charges in, and Franciscan priests pray for them all. Nearly 400 costumed volunteers enact…
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