Anecdotal Evidence

Marius Kociejowski has written to tell me the poet, critic, translator, Islamic scholar and voluptuary of sound Eric Ormsby has died, appare...

Among humans, complaining is always annoying. Short of murder, rape, theft and treason, it may be our most detestable quality. A complainer ...

  This blog has been around for more than twenty years and I could easily devote the next twenty to replying to the complaints I often recei...

“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I ...

Donald Justice on Edwin Arlington Robinson:   “Robinson’s techniques were more or less the same as those of his contemporaries, the meters...

I spent much of Monday in the hospital for “tests” involving various bodily fluids – one more reminder that the human body is profoundly rid...

Recently I woke from a dream adapted from Nostromo and directed by Joseph Conrad. Something about Martin Decoud in the lifeboat, weighted d...

 A nton Chekhov wrote nothing in the summer of 1888 but thought about writing a novel. He stayed at the villa of his editor and friend Aleks...

L ike Edward Gibbon, Yvor Winters tucks some of his best stuff into footnotes. Take this provocation from “English Literature in the Sixteen...

“I know, for both of us, the dead world’s much too crowded.”   Live long enough and all, reluctantly, must agree. Most of our relatives an...

“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I ...

We think Titus Lucretius Carus died on this date, October 15, in 55 B.C. at roughly age forty-four. We know he wrote the philosophical poem ...

I’ll spare you the joke the phlebotomist told me while drawing blood from my arm. Given the circumstance I mustered a polite titter in respo...

This is the time of year I feel a pang for the Northern autumn. The temperature in Houston, as I write on Monday, is eighty-six degrees. The...

As an obstinately monolingual American, I rely on the precious work of translators. The three poets I read most often in translation, in ord...