My understanding of what a poem is has been formed over a lifetime by the memory of the poems I love; the poems, or fragments of poems, that got into my head seemingly of their own volition, despite all the contriving powers of my natural idleness to keep them out. I discovered early on that a scrap of language can be like a tune in that respect: it gets into your head no matter what. In fact, I believe, that is the true mark of poetry: you remember it despite yourself.
“He sometimes says, ‘I’m not a writer, I’m a thief,’” said Kate McGrath, his friend and longtime producer. “I think that curiosity and openheartedness, and interest in listening to and absorbing other people and other cultures is probably what he describes as being a thief. But I would describe it as being an artist.”
Chief among these misconceptions is the view that feelings are innate and universal, and can be consistently measured. So, anger, for example, is thought of as a fundamental building block of human nature with a tell-tale physiological “fingerprint”; all we’ve done is gone and named it. But that idea is categorically untrue, Barrett says, and reams of scientific data now back her up.
The central voices of Sarah M. Sala’s debut collection Devil’s Lake are looking for something eternal within a catastrophic and violent world. They are looking for a time before the concreteness of the human body and its prescribed ills. They are looking for the body’s after.
It is one way of defining the adjective; but Robert McCrum helps us see just how many other dimensions there are to a “Shakespearean” sensibility. For one thing, there is the intoxicating, addictive spiral of self exploration in words, words and more words.
A professor of history at Harvard who won the Pulitzer Prize for a book on the United States’ early engagement in Vietnam, Logevall has a gifted historian’s grasp of the times as well as the life of JFK. At more than 600 pages of text, his book is long and ends four years before Kennedy is elected president. But this reader had trouble putting it down.
neither death nor life, nor angels with or without needling
pins, nor the devils we fear, nor the evils we do, nor rulers