At the museum they walked into both poetry and artistic inspiration. Hafer would write nine poems based on art and photography works; within a year, her daughter would receive her art degree, hold her first exhibition, and sell her first work. Hafer includes the nine poems in this 2023 collection, accompanied by the inspirational artworks themselves. The other 23 poems in the collection are matched to works by her daughter. (You can see many of Anna Hafer’s art works here.)
Martin Lorensen is a young man who’s been extremely lucky, or he’s extremely guilty. Twice he’s narrowly escaped death – a train wreck and a school shooting. Both times, his escape was a last-minute thing – a panic attack kept him from boarding the train and an upset stomach stopped him from entering school and returning home. In the train wreck case, he warned a mother and daughter not to board.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Poetic stories have been around ever since there were stories. The Epic of Gilgamesh, scholars say, was written sometime between 2150 and 1400 B.C. Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey sometime in the 9th or 8th century B.C. Closer to our own time, John Milton wrote his epic poems in the 1600s, and in the 19th century we had epic poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But our attention spans have grown shorter, as have our poems and our novels (a few contemporary Europeans notwithstanding).
It's not necessarily a bad thing. Writing short, or writing short well, requires laser-like focus, concise words, and abandoning adverbs. In Dwarf Stories, his most recent poetry collection, Bruce Lawder does exactly that.
Jewish men have been recently attacked in Brooklyn, Chicago, and Maryland. Every register that tracks such incidents says anti-Semitism is on the rise in America, and not only on elite college campuses. And just when I think these kinds of stories are being exaggerated as part of a right-wing conspiracy theory, a story like this comes along: what’s been going on in the country second-largest teachers’ union.
Jeff Bezos, found of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, made news this week by directing the Post not to endorse a presidential candidate. This followed the same move by the Los Angeles Times and was itself followed by USA Today. And then The Nation retracted its endorsement. But it was Bezos who drew the ire of journalists and the Left in general. Hamish McKenzie, founder of Substack, used his own column to point out something most critics have missed: Jeff Bezos has a business problem.
Punching the point home: Hugh Hewitt, one of the few conservative columnists at the Post, quit this week.
Next Tuesday, or in the weeks and months afterward, some candidate is going to lose. While dire threats from both left and right warn of violence to come, including “tabletop exercises” being planned possibly involving the Department of Homeland Security, some saner heads are counseling a different response; John Pletcher at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics has some suggestions for what to do if your candidate loses.
