Making a Pie (Instructions for Pie and Life) 1. The act of reading poetry is a fine thing to incorporate. Begin, say, with Cornelius Eady’s “Gratitude” and take it…
You can see the architecture of things in winter. Structures glisten. Naked trees drip with clear popsicles. We find ourselves alone with ourselves. Everyone else has gone away to…
There are picnics where people discuss how long the potato salad can be out in the heat and there are picnics where people discuss Wittgenstein. At Wittgenstein picnics, the people…
Maudlin: a feeling we don’t so much encounter as create. A sad place with funereal bits and a ladle of self-pity. Darker than Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, it…
Great writers wound us. Their words cut into our bodies; their ideas become notions of ourselves. Cue Joan Didion. She stitches sentences through your brain. You emerge exhausted and…
Revolution begins with devotion to a moral vision and a belief that egregious wrongs must be made right. In this way all revolutions are a revolution within. These days, there is…
Chicago. Sometimes it gets overlooked as a great city as we tend to focus our energies on considering the coasts and leave the interior as a great blur in…
Pastoral. For a long time we’ve thought of that simply as pastures, poetry about streams and paintings of lush, lime green grass. Cows. Works by Virgil. A certain longing for…