The Black Arts of Literary Biography Oct 30, 2009
Who wouldn t rather read a biography of Robbins than of, say, solid old Wallace Stevens even if Harmonium is better than The Carpetbaggers. In the Standard piece mentioned above, I wrote, freely adapting Ernest Rutherford s line that all science is either physics or stamp-collecting, that literary biography is either curtain-twitching or stamp collecting. (The American Conservative)
Making history. Or not. Sep 8, 2009
Harvard professor Helen Vendler phones in a pedestrian essay on the poet Wallace Stevens. The University of Rochester s Joan Shelley Rubin boils down a chapter from her 1992 classic The Making of Middlebrow Culture. (Boston Globe)
Don Aucoin: Who's schooling whom? Sep 5, 2009
Lately, Matt has been schooling me in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and James Merrill while also trying to help me understand why Doctor Atomic, by John Adams, is a landmark opera. Christine often steers me toward ingenious video clips on YouTube such as Animator vs. Animation, convincing me the site can be a showcase for creativity rather than the silly time-waster I saw it as. (Boston Globe)
It takes a village to educate a child Aug 29, 2009
In my 11th-grade honors American literature course, the students are engaged in a discussion of Wallace Stevens s Anecdote of a Jar. Listening to them, I mentally thank Dr. Weaver and Ms. Getzen for the sound preparation each has given these students in literature, writing, and expression over the last two years. (Boston Globe -- Editorial)
Same-Old, Same-Old Aug 5, 2009
Pope's "Epistle" wakes me up, enlivens me, in a way remarkably different from many poems by George Herbert or Emily Dickinson or Wallace Stevens. This poem is social. (Slate)
interview with Joseph ONeill Jul 14, 2009
Thats why people like Wallace Stevens and, more recently, Paul Muldoon are really good poets. Because their poems have this almost impenetrable mystery behind them. (Harper's Magazine)
Lieberman's works make a big impression Jul 11, 2009
Imagine the handiwork of an industrial-strength Wallace Stevens collaborating with a playful Charles Sheeler: a smokestack peeking over roofs, flanked by clouds, juxtaposed with a tree, garlanded with utility wires, and so on. Or consider the intrinsic visual playfulness of Lieberman s photograph of a Carrara marble quarry. (Boston Globe)
Sweetness and Spite Jun 25, 2009
As critic William H. Pritchard observed, Books by [light verse s] practitioners were reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, the general sense being that, in the age of [T.S.] Eliot and Wallace Stevens, it was an excellent alternative to high modernism. The practitioners themselves won Pulitzers and honorary doctorates. (The American Conservative)
Delmore Schwartz is Worth Another L... Jun 25, 2009
The Ballad of the Children of the Czar, a devastating adult satire in the guise of a perfectly controlled children s poem, is followed by the wonderfully erudite yet sensual In the Naked Bed, in Plato s Cave, and then At This Moment of Time, The Beautiful American Word, Sure, and O Love, Sweet Animal seem like equal parts Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke, all brewed with distinct Schwartzian elements and details that as if turn those other names inside out, from mere... (Suite101.com)
Peter Schjeldahl: A Shepard Fairey moment.00003266 Feb 16, 2009
Underfoot, the small, tidy image organized its rustic environs as a frame for itself, like Wallace Stevens s jar in Tennessee. I was delighted, as an Obama supporter. (New Yorker)
