Solstice musings: poetry, nonfiction & Mom’s Christmas letter. [This originally ran December 16, 2008.] When I read poems and when I (rarely) write them, I’m apt to think This is an essay! When poets gave up rhyme and meter, they exposed the fact that poetry and creative nonfiction can be one in the same, though poets are free to fictionalize. (Long ago I was taught the only definition of poetry is that the poet controls the length of his line.) The similarity does …
I observe a crucial difference between adults and college students. The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended—William Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality” Sunday night, I leashed the dog and took her upstairs. I had to grade a set of student essays, and the dog, Belle, had to accompany me because of a looming event at our house. My wife would soon host sixty freshmen. …
My “Wild Ducks,” a braided memoir, appears in River Teeth. The past few years, working on my memoir of farming in Appalachia, I’ve generated tons of material—twice, 500 pages—and have spun some passages into stand-alone pieces. The published ones include an essay on my hired hand who died; another about a legendary pond-builder with a tragic secret; one about the historic first meeting of my future wife and my father; yet another about my father’s return to farming in retirement …
This is the first paragraph of Anthony Lane’s review in this week’s New Yorker: When someone reboots a film franchise, as the makers of “The Amazing Spider-Man” have done, what are we meant to think of the original boot? The first “Spider-Man” came out in 2002, followed by its obligatory sequels in 2004 and 2007. If you are a twenty-year-old male of unvarnished social aptitude, those movies will seem like much-loved classics that have eaten up half your lifetime. They …
A deeply processed tribute to Nora Ephron. I admire it.
Thanks to Leslie Miller, friend and fellow blogger, who corrected some wit’s work and sent it to me. Quick as you please. She moved the series into proper order, per the drawing, and capitalized proper nouns. Hope the (surely visual) artist who did this doesn’t get mad. But then, s/he probably stole the idea from a book, maybe from Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Here’s one I use in class to try to show the importance of commas, which most undergraduates …
Also known as the serial comma, and I’m a fan, too—legions of journalists and Cormac McCarthy notwithstanding . . .