Asides

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism.

Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn’t behave like that. Take birds—in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won’t mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive […]

But what we experience as readers is never exactly what the poet experienced, nor would there be any point in its being, though certainly it has some relation to the poet’s experience. What the poet experienced is not poetry but poetic material; the writing of the poetry is a fresh “experience” for him, and the […]

Not that Snowman passes judgment. He knows how these things go, or used to go. He’s a grown-up now, with much worse things on his conscience. So who is he to blame them? (He blames them.) Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.

If people only wrote when they had something to say, and never merely because they wanted to write a book, or because they occupied a position such that the writing of books was expected of them, the mass of criticism would not be wholly out of proportion to the small number of critical books worth […]

There was in fact a circle of hell beneath this one that required an entirely different set of skills that she did not possess. Ann Patchett, State of Wonder.

  As Rumi once explained, intelligence comes in two forms. There is the secondhand intelligence of a child’s memorizing facts delivered through books and teachers—the sort of intelligence that will get you a job as a civil engineer or help you distinguish between the Five Pillars of Islam and the seven sacraments of Roman Catholicism. […]

He was pale with high red cheeks, a fellow traveller who wanted her to ask him why he was flying to Miami and if that was his final destination. He wanted her to tell him she was going on to South America so that he would be impressed and ask her what she planned on […]

Every year I tell my BU undergraduates that there are two worthy pursuits for college students. One is preprofessional—preparing for a career that will put food on the table and a roof overhead. The other is more personal—finding big questions worth asking, which is to say questions that cannot be answered in a semester, or […]