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The words we use
Life magazine’s coverage of the Watts riots in 1965 has a lesson for the Treyvon ...
Vox populi
As someone who has taken decades to find his voice, I think a lot about the word. Though its etymological origin lies in human utterance, we musicians speak of the voicing of an instrument, which means its tone color as well as the way a given chord is “spelled” (e.g., in its first, second, and […]
Warren Zevon as poet
I recently sounded out a wise man of letters (and my friend) Jake Burnett about poetry as musical lyric, preoccupied as I have been in forecasting the headaches my poems would occasion a composer. Happily he did not send me to Sidney Lanier. At Jake’s suggestion I dived into Warren Zevon’s “My Ride’s Here,” the […]
Frederick Seidel, Compassion Artist
Seidel is known for being a bit rough, for breaking poetic taboos. Yet today I’ve been looking at his 1963 poem “To My Friend Anne Hutchinson,” which is is skillful, gentle, and touching.
In Closing
I think a lot about the sense of closure in literature, probably because of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), in which he argues that a key element of the author-reader contract is finding consonance between a beginning, a middle, and an end; and that particular, identifiable […]
W.S. Merwin’s “Rain Travel”
Here’s a clever and beautiful poem from 1993. I’ve added line numbers for convenience. I wake in the dark and remember it is the morning when I must start by myself on the journey I lie listening to the black hour before dawn and you are still asleep beside me while around us the trees […]