Everything I know fits inside my body, but where does my body end? Is it as deep and wide as the lake in which I swim? Is it as thin as an electric guitar’s high E string? The lead guitarist solos; my body bends, ascends, and descends with the notes. He’s playing a Gibson SG, or is he playing me? Body of knowledge: when the masseuse applies pressure, is my body included in the body of knowledge she has mastered?... Read more
Winter is coming. All of northern Michigan seems to whisper the warning. The sun is slower to rise each day, and the mist clings to the lakes when I drive my children to school in the darkness. Our neighbors have been anticipating the first snowfall since we arrived here in August, when it was ninety-two degrees and sunny. They look stern and offer advice (much-needed) on snow tires and Vitamin D supplements. I can’t help but think of the residents... Read more
In July 2016, I watched season one of Stranger Things with my younger brother. I didn’t encounter a Demogorgon in the small town where we grew up, but I did use walkie-talkies, grow infatuated with girls from school, and roam the neighborhood on my bike. Last week, I watched season two with my wife, the older girl in high school who I had crush on. Long before we were married, I even found the confidence to ask her, a junior,... Read more
The end of Arcade Fire’s latest album finds the band somewhere unexpected: the tomb of Christ. “Mary, roll away the stone,” frontman Win Butler rasps as “We Don’t Deserve Love” approaches its climax. “The men that you love always leave you alone.” Many reviews of Everything Now—the band’s worst-received effort by far, according to Metacritic—take issue with the album’s apparently unqualified cynicism. But these same reviews have made nothing of the redemptive recognition invoked at the album’s end. Distracted by... Read more
Did you ever try finding words for the experience of prayer? Or for the sense of mysterious contact with the divine? That’s what Scott Cairns is attempting in “Speculation: Along the Way.” He tries out a metaphor of a distant thunderstorm — which might however be within. “Might” is in fact a key word in this poem of deliberate tentativeness. Look at all the phrases denoting the tentative: “may seem oddly”; “that’s how it feels, anyway”; “it hardly matters”; “maybe,”... Read more
I don’t remember when I first starting reading Richard Wilbur’s poetry. But his death on October 14th, at age ninety-six, has returned me to my favorites among his immense output of poems. At the top of my list, indeed one of my favorite of all twentieth century poems, is the magical “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” The poem begins with the famous image of angels seen in the laundry hung outside to dry, to the person... Read more
Richard Wilbur was always a formalist at heart, but one attuned to the rhythms of a living language. Like Frost and Stevens, he insisted on an underlying meter in his verse—most often a loose iambic pentameter line. In Williams’s free verse he often heard an underlying metrical beat which undergirded his poems. He grew up not very far from Rutherford, New Jersey, Williams’s hometown, and, in spite of Williams’s verse experimentation, “could hear Williams’s own high, hectoring voice speaking in... Read more
It was back in the summer of 1995 during Image’s Glen Workshop that I had the opportunity to interview Dick Wilbur for Image. Wilbur was someone whose poetry—I am especially thinking here of poems like “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”—I’d read in my late teens and been drawn to, especially because the poem’s clotheslines reminded me so much of the backyards of the New York tenements where I’d grown up. Over the following years I kept... Read more
My son Sam, like many six-year-olds, is a devout observer of Halloween. He loves the candy, of course, but he also thrills to the other accoutrements of the holiday: the decorations, the parties, the music (his favorite song is Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”). Sam is also an unusually dogmatic trick-or-treater, as he will wear only costumes inspired by the sinister underworld. In his view, darkening a neighborhood doorway dressed as a baseball player or barnyard... Read more
I love it when poems speak to each other and expand on a shared theme. The epigraph here references the well-known poem “Church Going” by Phillip Larkin. Both poems describe churches, their architecture and unique interiors. However, they also explore more universal questions about the role and relevance of organized religion. Brown doesn’t mince words. “I’m seeing the church/ I grew up with, shadowed like this to let/the glitter in. Dignity’s what held me/then and almost makes a Christian of... Read more
Good Letters
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