When you leave a job, one of the hardest decisions you have to make on cleaning out your desk is what to do with the coffinlike cardboard tray holding 958 fresh-smelling business cards. You can’t thro...
I think I am done with Wikipedia for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue - a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they we...
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
You need the art in order to love the life.
I ate a vendor's hot dog with sauerkraut (a combination whose tastiness still makes me tremble), walking fast in order to save as much of the twenty minutes of my lunch hour I had left for reading.
I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay...
Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph t...
What does "poet laureate" mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now.
Anthology knowledge isn't real knowledge.
Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microh...
Why are things beautiful? I don´t know. That´s a good question. Isn´t it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher, or a speaker, and he or she says, That´s a good question? Don´t you fe...
Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.
I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual d...
Carpe diem' doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. 'Carpe diem' means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be cape diem, if my school Latin servies. No R...
The nice thing about putting on your glasses in the dark is that you know you could see better if it were light, but since it is dark the glasses make no difference at all.
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.
One above their individual homes about a quarter of an inch, and most would fall back in place; but some, the loosest, would loft higher and often land irregularly, leaving one graspable end sticking...
But now, after the news of Barthelme’s death, this simple fact of or , which I had begun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I...
From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pat...