Line Art and Longing

by | Jun 28, 2012 | The Public Humanist

There’s a passage in C.S. Lewis’s book about his late conversion to Christianity, Surprised by Joy, in which he describes an aesthetic experience from his childhood that exemplifies the core of his spiritual longings. He recalls looking at Beatrix...

More Pore-tree

by | Jun 7, 2012 | Ten Gallon Liberal

So last week, I wrote about poetry. A few days later, as fortune would have it, I got some good news about my own poetry. Then I read this swelled-head antidote.

Transits

by | Jun 11, 2012 | Ten Gallon Liberal

After learning a lot about the 1769 transit of Venus via Mark Anderson’s fine book The Day the World Discovered the Sun, I enjoyed immensely the sudden sky-clearing that enabled me to run into the front yard and hastily set up binoculars and a pad of paper to...

Why It's Smarter Not to Be a Poet

by | Jun 14, 2012 | Ten Gallon Liberal

Being a poet is basically absurd. (I first typed “absurb,” which is probably also true.) People are apparently reading the stuff, good, bad and middling. But trying to get your book published? A very good poet of my acquaintance shopped his manuscript for...

Obama, Bush and Romney

by | Jun 25, 2012 | Ten Gallon Liberal

Glenn Greenwald and Ibrahim Mothana illustrate why this fall is, in some ways, unimportant: Mothana, in the New York Times: Unfortunately, liberal voices in the United States are largely ignoring, if not condoning, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen...