More than a thousand poetry books appear in this country each year. More people write poetry in this country—publish it, hear it, and presumably read it—than ever before. Let us quickly and loudly proclaim that no poet sells like Stephen King, that poetry is not as popular as professional wrestling, and that fewer people attend poetry readings in the United States than in Russia. Snore, snore. More people read poetry now in the United States than ever did before.
To end a holiday concert at Montréal’s symphony hall earlier this month, superstar conductor and five-time 2023 Grammy nominee Yannick Nézet-Séguin led his hometown orchestra, two soloists, a massive choir, and the Taurey Butler Trio in a rousing performance of one of Québec’s most beloved holiday favorites: “Glory, Alleluia.” As in “Glory, Glory, Alleluia.” Yes, that very American tune—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—set to seasonal French lyrics.
Why, every Christmas, do so many people endure the mess of dried pine needles, the risk of a fire hazard and impossibly tangled strings of lights?
Strapping a fir tree to the hood of my car and worrying about the strength of the twine, I sometimes wonder if I should just buy an artificial tree and do away with all the hassle. Then my inner historian scolds me – I have to remind myself that I'm taking part in one of the world's oldest religious traditions. To give up the tree would be to give up a ritual that predates Christmas itself.
As a child in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Oryan Cumaraiah-Misso remembers excitedly readying himself in front of a handheld meat grinder to crush cashews. It was his part in his family’s annual tradition of preparing a 60-year-old recipe for Christmas cake that had been passed down for generations. Christmas cake – a moist, decadent treat filled with nuts and fruit – usually kicks off the holiday season on the island nation, and for immigrants in the US, has become a way to preserve traditions from back home.
Not much is known about the inner life of mushrooms, but we can guess at the presence of a sort of subterranean sociality from the extensive networks of underground filaments that link individual organisms to a vast community of plants, tree roots and other fungi. Although the mushroom’s cap and stalk are its most obvious features, they are only the visible signs of a deeper life — the way that the tip of an iceberg hints at the bulk obscured below, the white and black keys of the piano represent the hidden strings full of unstructured, potential sound. Or the way that certain novels give the impression of being animated by a force that has little to do with their ordered combination of words. Instead these narratives seem to orbit their own expression: They exist beyond language, above it, or maybe even below it — who could say of something as elusive as story precisely how or where it eludes?
There's a great clear balloon inside me
so forget my innards, the muriatic acid