Wide world of … sports?
There’s a little sports spectacle, something about a cup that belongs to some guy named Stanley, that has been taking up most of the oxygen in the sports universe lately.…
poetry
Homer’s Odyssey Revisited
Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Thus begins the 1897 translation by Samuel Butler…
The Father of Modern English
As I promised in a previous post, here’s my almost certainly true and accurate explanation of why the language you’re reading now is the result of one man’s writing back…
Not the Chaucer You’re Looking For
I received a couple of new Chaucer books recently and, despite my love of reading Chaucer, frankly, I was disappointed by both. My expectations for both greatly exceeded what little…
Musings on Haiku
I can’t recall just when I first encountered haiku, that subtle, concise and often baffling Japanese poetry, but I suspect it was sometime in the late 1960s, not long after…
Back to Horace No. 2
I was browsing online recently because I wanted to order another book of Horace’s Odes or maybe his Epistles in my efforts to understand and appreciate the poet more fully.…
Back to Horace
During the pandemic lockdowns, I heard a lot of people bemoan their inability to travel; on vacation, to visit relatives, to shop, or just to get out of their homes…
The Science Fiction of Robert Frost
Robert Frost was a great American poet, and I’ve enjoyed many of his poems over the decades I’ve been reading poetry. Some are a tad bucolic for my taste, but…
Music and poetry and funny stuff
But first: what a race! ??? Gold for ?? in the 4×100 at the Worlds!! Big tip of the cap to our dudes @KingsleySC and @De6rasse big backstretch from Jerome…
Ars Poetica
Horace’s Ars Poetica, or the Art of Poetry, was written as a 476-line poem in a letter to his friend, the Roman senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso (Lucius) and his two…
Kerouac’s Haikus
Haiku is like a razor blade: small, light, but yet strong and incredibly sharp. Haiku says “Look over there!” and then smacks you from the other side. Haiku is the…
Musings on the First Tercet of Dante’s Inferno
Back in December, before Godaddy broke my blog through technical incompetence, I had written a piece about the first stanza in Inferno, the first book of Dante’s trilogy, The Divine…
Midway Through This Life’s Journey V.2
For some inexplicably serendipitous reason, I pulled Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante’s Inferno (Graywolf, 2012) from my bookshelves this week and began re-reading it. I didn’t like her version…
In Flanders Fields? It’s time to encourage another generation of school kids to read some better poems from the Great War
A civilization that forgets its poetry is barely worthy of the name. Like fiction and unlike non-fiction, poetry is how a culture’s most profound truths are told. Unlike fiction, poetry…
When Did I Become My Parents?
When Did I Become My Parents? When did I stop listening to new music, and change the dial to something familiar: oldies, classic rock; comfortable tunes? When did I stop…
Musings on Poets and Poetry
For me, reading the American literary critic, Harold Bloom, is often like wading in molasses. Intellectual molasses, to be sure, but slow going nonetheless. His writing is thick with difficult…
I Struggle With Milton
Confession time: I find a lot of epic or narrative poetry a slog. Milton, Homer, Dante… I have read my way into them all, but unlike my other books, I…
Pandemic Report # 6
It might be a good time for ventriloquists.
Reading Catullus
With the extra time to read on my hands these days, I’ve been dipping again into the poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Roman poet around the time of Julius Caesar.…