Nonfiction

* Like most people who sense that their love affair is going to pieces, Anna Karenina and Prince Vronsky try a few desperate measures to check the disintegration. One of these measures – available only to the upper classes – was travel. They go abroad, to Italy, and there they make the acquaintance of an…

"Like a rock in the sea, she was islanded by fields, the heavy grass washing about the house, and the cattle wading in it as in water. Even their gentle stirrings were a loss when they moved away at evening to the shelter of the woods. A rainy day might strike a wet flash from…

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;…

Some of my favorite poems by Elizabeth Bishop are not among her Complete Poems published in 1969. They have appeared singly since and whet the appetite for a new collection. Not counting several translations of Brazilian verse, eight new poems have appeared in. The New Yorker: "In the Waiting Room," "Night-City (From a Plane)," "12…

Herbert's poetry is an imitation of an action. Or rather, it is an imitation of a transaction. Usually, it goes beyond imitation to engage in the transaction. My critical point of departure is gift-giving, and I have chosen gift-giving not simply because it is a recurrent image or motif in Herbert's poetry but because it…

(from Contos de Aprendiz) I was born on a July afternoon in a small town called Turmalinas, which had a jail, a church and a school, all near each other. The jail, with its peeling wall, was old. God only knows how the prisoners inside lived and ate, but it held an inescapable fascination for…

[ Translator's note: What follows is a selection of passages from E1 Mono Gramatico (literally, "The Monkey Grammarian," but not to be taken literally: to be taken freely, calling up all the puns, associations, analogies that flood our minds when we juggle mono, mono, gram-, grammar, grammarian of monads, monkish keys, graminivorous appetite for semantics…

Charles Simic, whose most easily available collections of poems are Dismantling the Silence (Braziller, 1971) and Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (Braziller, 1974), spoke on a Friday afternoon in March, 1975 with George Starbuck in a New Hampshire kitchen. Much of the conversation centered on another book, White, (New Rivers…

Our conversation began by wandering into the visual arts. Knowing Mark Strand had painted, and had come to Iowa from the M.F.A. program at Yale, I asked if he kept up with the work of contemporary art. S: I follow the work of a few friends and sometimes write art catalogs or brochures, but I…