Nonfiction

I remember Yiannoula bringing huge balls of fresh cheese to our house, cheeses larger than soccerballs. They were wrapped in cloth, and fat drops of milk would stain the flagstones as she carried them across the courtyard to where my grandfather waited, near the door of the storeroom. Half of it would be sliced and…

Watchman, tell us of the night And what the signs of promice are . . . . -old hymn In my few years as a critic and reviewer, I have been mainly preoccupied with the night rather than the signs of promise. Such criticism no doubt makes enemies, especially among those who fancy that, thanks…

" plain (plan) adj. 1. clear or distinct to the eye or ear: persons in plain sight. 2. clear to the mind; evident, manifest, or obvious: to make one's meaning plain. 3. conveying the meaning clearly or simply; easily understood: plain talk. 4. downright; sheer: plain folly. 5. free from ambiguity or evasion; candid, outspoken….

Lammon: Doing this interview with you reminds me of Hall's story in Remembering Poets. Hall went to interview T.S. Eliot and brought with him two "technicians" – Louis Simpson and yourself. Bly: Yes. The days before I had said: "Don, let me go with you." He said, "No, Robert," "Come on, Don. He'll be dead…

Adorno writes of Stravinsky: "Stravinsky's imitators remained far behind their model, because they did not possess his power of renunciation, that perverse joy in self-denial. . . . To a very large degree taste coincides with the ability to refrain from tempting artistic means." Ralph Hamilton's paintings exhibit to an extraordinary degree the "power of…

Words set to music, words that are sung, are not pleasing to the most refined connoisseurs of the art of sound. Among those who still tolerate them, many prefer choral works in which the word disappears; others want to hear only the sonorous arabesque of the voice (without being able to make out a single…

October 28, 1980 Dear Gail, Caroline and Pete, I am finally in residence at No. 8 Brighton Vale, having been in the meantime in Scotland, namely Glasgow and the Lochs, Belfast, and Dun Laoghaire for an uneasy five weeks while waiting to get finally into this beautiful pink house, pink like the powder on an…

– But what do you want? – A life. – A life? *     *      * It's possible to love solitude when you're surrounded by a life-with-others. When there is no life-with-others, ultimate things lose their relative meaning. *     *      * In folk tales, what we've come to consider the human world, the real real world, is the…

I When Intelligence approaches its goal only to pull back at the prompting of instinct, we stand alerted to something whose charged importance demands that we approach it again. My point of departure comes not from David Jones but rather from an essay of 1979 by Robert Hass on Tomas Transtromer. Several of his sentences…