Wednesday In a fascinating project described by New Yorker author Jia Tolentino a while back, a young filmmaker used Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself to understand Alabama culture. Touring the state, Jennifer Crandall had different people recite lines from the poem, including a drug court judge in an open session. I highly recommend watching the […]
Looking for the literary significance of my latest grandchild, I turn to Walcott, Whitman, Masefield, Coleridge, and Byron. What emerges is a mystical seeker.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", "Sea Fever", "Tales of the Islands", baby names, Derek Walcott, J. D. Salinger, John Masefield, John Milton, Laurence Sterne, Lord Byron, Lucille Clifton, Paradise Lost, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, To Esme with Love and Squalor, Tristram Shandy, William Blake | Poetry adds an extra dimension to sleeping outdoors.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Adam's Curse", "Fern Hill", "Poem in October", "Sleeping in the Forest", "Song of the Open Road", "Stopping by the Woods on a Showy Evening", After Apple-Picking, Anam Cara, Dylan Thomas, John O'Donohue, Mary Oliver, Nature, Robert Frost, sleep, William Butler Yeats | In “Reading with Patrick,” English teacher Michelle Kuo works with a student in 8th grade and then later after he has killed a man. The story brings up questions about lit’s impact.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Song of Myself", C. S. Lewis, Frederick Douglass, Gilead, Hansberry (Lorraine), Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lorraine Hansberry, Marilynne Robinson, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, poverty, Prison, Raisin in the Sun | A Salon article explores how some of white supremacism’s rise can be traced to rage over having had a black president. Quoting Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” it makes the case that the right couldn’t really see Obama.
To celebrate July 4, do not listen to Donald Trump, who preaches paranoia and exclusion. Read Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” His America contains multitudes.
When a Russian history professor died at our college, his colleagues turned to poetry as they wrestled with his premature death. Ovid, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, and Walt Whitman provided powerful words.
Recent evidence further confirms what most Shakespeare scholars believe: that Shakespeare wrote the plays ascribed to him. The Bard’s social anxieties, however, may have communicated themselves to the skeptics, who play out their own anxieties as they attempt to tear him down.
My Trinidadian daughter-in-law today becomes an American citizen. I welcome her with an excerpt from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that contains multitudes.
