A book is always about the world, and happy people don’t have time for “about.” 14. Through writing, if you’re lucky, you ...

It turns out that for Ashbery, the big theory was psychoanalysis, the process by which secondhand knowledge becomes firsthand.” ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

through the café-window créped in powder-smoke? The bill for the new farce reads Sleepers Awake.

Remember where I came from. Think of a continent of sabled czars. Leave your home. Let exile fill your mouth like the lost language of the child. Understand the reason. A man who would not wear the ...

"Come with me, and I will show you a beautiful bed. " And St. Francis led her to a large fire.

Wrought on you by surprise.

it stands here quiet in the cool salt taste of the morning.

The guidance counselor was my driver’s ed teacher. He liked to talk about football. He didn’t guide me much on driving. I angled the car into the school lot. We never practiced parallel parking.

And wylde for to hold, though I seme tame. W.S. MERWIN: I think this is probably the greatest sonnet Wyatt wrote, and I think it's one of the greatest sonnets in English. I've known it for so many ...

When my mother died in the mid-seventies, her only extant portrait took on a greater significance. Thus photography’s basic function: “Photography is an elegiac art,” as Susan Sontag wrote. To the ...

“Restaurants will break your heart” is something that I often hear myself saying. It has become a mantra. When did I start saying it, I wonder. Maybe it was when I first discovered the criss-crossed ...