I’ve never read a poem quite like Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby. I would expect that you haven’t either. Written in unrhymed pentameter, this is a poem about the history of poetry. It is also a poem about literary theory. It’s a poem that reads like what you might find in an academic journal on linguistics or communication technology. In other words, unless you’re familiar with literary theory and can translate academese, you’re going to find this poem a tough go.
I admit it: I found it a tough go. If I pretended anything else, I wouldn’t just be posing as an idiot. Remove the returns after each line, turning it into paragraphs, and you have an academic paper.
The speech Vice President J.D. Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference last week continues to reverberate. I don’t think I can recall a recent speech that has had as much reaction and response as this one, and it was on top of the one Vance gave at the Paris meeting on artificial intelligence. The Critic Magazine in the UK said Europe deserved it; The Spectator says it sent shockwaves across the continent. Matt Taibbi at Racket News looked at the reaction and said the mask has dropped.
We express gratitude for many things – recovery from an illness, a thankful child, the generosity of a friend, and a recognition at work, to mention only a few. But have you thought about being grateful for a jar of buttons on the dresser, the smell of toast, how to preserve lemons, the satisfaction of making a list, or an empty box?
These are a few of the things coursing through Gratitude Diary: Poems, the debut collection by Jessica Cohn. Structured within a 10-day cycle, the poems focus on unusual items for which one might be grateful, but some explain themselves. The objects are themselves symbols of something else, something fundamental in a person’s life.
A review of "Brookhaven" by Jody Collins on Substack:
"As you know, Miss Putnam, every story has a before, a during, and an after. I think it's how we make sense of the stories we hear, to organize them that way. Novels are like that, generally." Sam McClure (the elder) in "Brookhaven" by @Glynn Young. Historical fiction is my new favorite genre and Glynn Young's story, Brookhaven is the main reason why. I was a poor student of the Civil War when I was in school, so I learned a lot about particulars of a number of battles, as well as the effects of the war on the South. Young manages to weave a love story into a mystery surrounding a stealth-footed youth whose undercover intelligence (supposedly) aided Robert E. Lee and his army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. This poet also enjoyed Young's addition of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem at the head of each chapter, making Brookhaven both a time capsule of literature and a captivating, history book-worthy tale. (from my Amazon review). If you’re a historical fiction/love story fan, I highly recommend “Brookhaven.”
From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”
I’ve read Nightwatch, which is aimed at young adult audiences. It’s a coming-of-age story, focused on a boy named Mark Baker from his young childhood to his ten years. It’s a good story with an “edge” I haven’t usually seen in young adult books.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Peter Biles, a fiction writer and essayist, discovered freedom in writing when he stopped worrying about “literary style” and instead focused on telling a story. He writes about it at Front Porch Republic: “Writing for the Common Good.”
Regardless of what you think about the new Administration, something extraordinary happened at the AI Summit in Paris: Vice President J.D. Vance gave a speech that the Europeans clearly disliked but needed to hear, and it is one fine speech. I watched it and I read the transcript, and it’s a speech like what used to be given when political leaders actually gave intelligent speeches. I didn’t know that, a year ago when Vance (then a first-term senator) spoke to largely the same group in Munich, he was essentially ignored and treated with disdain over a message their own peoples were telling them. Not this time. You can read the transcript of his Munich speech here.
Of all the news pouring out of Washington with “the Great Upheaval,” two items in particular caught my eye. The U.S. government has directly and indirectly been funding Hamas for years, including $2.1 billion since the terror group killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 250 hostages on Oct 7, 2023. The second concerns the Environmental Protection Agency, and the now-infamous “we’re dumping gold bars off the Titanic” caper, as one EPA staffer described it to an undercover journalist. The gold bars have been found, and the story and the antics involved are extraordinary even by Washington standards.
The stories about USAID, EPA, and the other targets of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are resonating in some pretty unexpected places, like with former officials of the Obama Administration. We are witnessing a sea change the like of which we haven’t seen in our lifetimes.
