Raccoons and Uncertainty

Markings on wood, from the African art collection at the Brooklyn Museum: Beautifully ambiguous Poems, poets and poetry provide a parallel universe that sometimes helps make a little more sense of my own huddled world of paintings, painters and art. A good example is this excerpt from an essay by Joel Brouwer that appeared on […]

A Controlled Refinement of Sobbing

Nicholas Baker’s writing ranges between forceful and compelling tirades (like his exposure of the wanton destruction of books by the San Francisco Public Library in favor of microfilm) and those excessively detailed, slightly OCDish, minutiae-driven novels that can sometimes be just a little too much. But I always pay attention to what he’s paying attention […]

Poetry and Truth

Peculiar to poetry is a preconceived expectation of “truth”. David Orr’s essay in the Times Sunday Book Review captures some of this response in spite of cynicism in the culture about literary authenticity, particularly following a spate of memoir writers whose manufactured memories and inaccurate portrayals were exposed and condemned. Orr starts with an anecdote […]