The poet May Swenson, in her preface to a selection of Tomas Transtromer poems she had translated into English, offers what might be the perfect vision for public education: Signals and responses radiating from our…
Browsing Category Literature/Arts
Elementary America: A Soul More Protean and Mercurial
In Emerson’s “American Scholar” he asserts his goal is to proclaim that America can and should slough off the historical legacy of European thought and literature. Ever after our poets are confronted with the requirement…
Reading Is (and Is Not) Power
Historically, reading is power. Rather, reading was an activity limited to those in power. The Catholic Church refused to allow the Bible to be translated from the Latin (a Power language of the church) to…
Human Potential, Time Discipline and Post-Edenic Mind
There is only rendering, the rendered, upon which there is thought. This is the basis of our understanding of mind. Ruskin, Freud, Proust…Bernays, Goebbels, Gossage and so on. In one sense there is an undiscovered…
The Railroad Rides Upon Us: On the Pursuit of Uneventfulness
We embody a type of greatness. We are of capacity. We are of potential. And yet we are nearly entirely imbecilic in body and mind. Of what, on what, in what do we spend our…
“It contains us.” Setting Poetry’s Course in Tranströmer
[This piece began as an email between its author and Indiana Poet Laureate Karen Kovacik but grew deeper out of a discussion with Errant contributor Eric Sargent. I have stolen freely from Mr. Sargent. That’s…
Sunday Sermon: (Nobel) Prizing Doing
What are people for? This is the title of a book of essays by Wendell Berry (and one of the essays within). I’d say people are not generally for anything. But that is probably not…
Nobel for Literature to the Transformers? No, that’s Transtromer!
*The “transformer” joke in this post’s title, if it can be called a joke, came at the insistence of “spell check” in WordPress. From the LA Times, Sweden Poet Tomas Transtromer Awarded Nobel Prize in…
It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who You Really Are
Editor’s Note: All Links are Audio at You Tube. Sometimes we all get a bit bogged down. I spent the morning trying to explain myself and my perspective on how screwed up Western Capitalist thinking…
True Education: Huck’s River, Against the Banks
I’ve been chatting with my friend Eric, who is a teacher, about Huckleberry Finn and we were discussing the difficulty of actually reading this greatest and most seminal of American novels (as Hemingway opined, though…