Poetry Monday!: "The Persian Version" by Robert Graves
"Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon / The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon...."
Literature
Poetry Tuesday!: "The Pobble Who Has No Toes" by Edward Lear
"The Pobble who has no toes / Had once as many as we; / When they said 'Some day you may lose them all;' / He replied 'Fish, fiddle-de-dee!'..."
AMC, Amazon Offer Up Television Adaptations of Two Hot Books
Too Close and The Underground Railroad provide wildly different experiences.
Poetry Tuesday!: "Листья" ("Leaves") by Fyodor Tyutchev
"О буйные ветры, / Скорее, скорей! / Скорей нас сорвите / С докучных ветвей! / Сорвите, умчите, / Мы ждать не хотим, / Летите, летите! / Мы с вами летим!.."
Poetry Monday!: "anyone lived in a pretty how town" by e.e. cummings
only the snow can begin to explain how children are apt to forget to remember with up so floating many bells down...
Poetry Monday!: "The Four Friends" by A.A. Milne
"Ernest was an elephant, a great big fellow, / Leonard was a lion with a six-foot tail, / George was a goat, and his beard was yellow, / And James was a very small snail...."
SPECIAL Poetry Monday!: "Romance de la luna, luna" by Federico García Lorca (Spanish)
"La luna vino a la fragua / con su polisón de nardos. / El niño la mira, mira. / El niño la está mirando...."
SPECIAL Poetry Tuesday!: "Herbst" ("Autumn") by Rainer Maria Rilke (German)
Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt. Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.
The Overly Examined Life of Henry David Thoreau
Cartoonist Peter Bagge looks at Henry David Thoreau's life at Walden and beyond
SPECIAL Poetry Tuesday!: "Mednyi vsadnik" ("The Bronze Horseman") by Aleksandr Pushkin
"From here, we'll show the Swede our saber; / We'll build a city on the sea, / To better spite our haughty neighbor. / Our destiny is manifest -- / To cut a window to the West..."
SPECIAL Poetry Monday!: "La chambre double" by Charles Baudelaire
« Et hue donc ! bourrique ! Sue donc, esclave ! Vis donc, damné ! »
SPECIAL Poetry Monday!: "The Epic (Including the Morte d'Arthur)" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In honor of my 100 YouTube subscribers, a special reading of a lovely Arthurian poem.
Poetry Monday!: "So That's Who I Remind Me Of" by Ogden Nash
"When I consider men of golden talents, / I'm delighted, in my introverted way, / To discover, as I'm drawing up the balance, / How much we have in common, I and they...."
Poetry Monday!: "Vers dorés" by Gérard de Nerval
"Homme, libre penseur ! te crois-tu seul pensant / Dans ce monde où la vie éclate en toute chose ? / Des forces que tu tiens ta liberté dispose, / Mais de tous tes conseils l'univers est absent...."
Why Dr. Seuss Is Worth Defending
Banishing him from library shelves is a slippery slope.
The iocane powder trick with the Vizzini meta-twist
Where does this variation on Mithridatism come from?
Poetry Monday!: "Rules and Regulations" by Lewis Carroll
Written at age 13 for his younger brother and sister: "A short direction / To avoid dejection, / By variations / In occupations, / And prolongation / Of relaxation, / And combinations / Of recreations..."
Poetry Monday!: "Dane-geld" by Rudyard Kipling
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld, / No matter how trifling the cost; / For the end of that game is oppression and shame, / And the nation that pays it is lost!"
Poetry Tuesday!: "Ia mechtoiu lovil ukhodiashchie teni" ("With my dreams I caught the departing shadows") by Konstantin Balmont
"Я мечтою ловил уходящие тени, / Уходящие тени погасавшего дня..."
Poetry Monday: "My Three Loves" by Henry S. Leigh
"I knew not which to make my pet, — my pipe, cigar, or cigarette..."
Poetry Monday!: "love is more thicker than forget" by e.e. cummings
"love is more thicker than forget / more thinner than recall / more seldom than a wave is wet / more frequent than to fail..."
Poetry Monday!: "Chanson d'automne" by Oscar Milosz
"Écoutez la voix du vent dans la nuit..."
Poetry Monday!: "Evolution" by Langdon Smith
"When you were a tadpole and I was a fish in the Paleozoic time..."
Poetry Monday: "Would I Be Shrived?" by John D. Swain
A second member of the small genre of poems pretending to be by the French poet François Villon.
Poetry Tuesday!: "The reticent volcano keeps…" by Emily Dickinson
In this age of Internet and social media, Emily Dickinson tells us to be as quiet as a volcano.
Should We Stop Streaming Gone With the Wind?
No, we should interrogate its persistent popularity and our relationship to it as forcefully as possible.
Understanding Ellison
In a new collection of letters, the great Invisible Man author is further revealed.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Black Man: Thomas Chatterton Williams
The new memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race is a powerful personal statement and national call to arms.
Booker Prize Winner Bernardine Evaristo: 'This Whole Idea of Cultural Appropriation Is Ridiculous'
"I refuse to construct some kind of character who is going to appease everybody."
