Tim Miller

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    • Mark Van Doren, “Axle Song”

      That any thing should be – Place, time, earth, error – And a round eye in man to see: That was the terror. And a true mind to try Cube, sphere, deep, short, and long – That was the burden of the sky’s Hoarse axle song. Improbable the stoat – The mouse, toad, worm, wolf,…

    • Charles Reznikoff, “A grove of small trees”

      A grove of small trees, branches thick with berries, and within it, the constant twitter of birds. The trees of the park this cold windy day for want of leaves are hung with paper – strips of dirty paper. Charles Reznikoff, 1894-1976 – “A grove of small trees” from The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918-1975

    • Austin Clarke, “The Planter’s Daughter”

      When night stirred at sea And the fire brought a crowd in, They say that her beauty Was music in mouth And few in the candlelight Thought her too proud, For the house of the planter Is known by the trees. Men that had seen her Drank deep and were silent, The women were speaking…

    • Wallace Stevens: 11 Essential Poems (new episode)

      An episode from 2/19/24: Tonight, I read eleven essential poems by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). All of them can be found in his Collected Poems. I also read from his letters, and the essay about Stevens at The Poetry Foundation. The poems are: The biographies of Stevens that I mention are the two-volumes…

    • Louise Bogan, “The Alchemist”

      I burned my life, that I might find A passion wholly of the mind, Thought divorced from eye and bone, Ecstasy come to breath alone. I broke my life, to seek relief From the flawed light of love and grief. With mounting beat the utter fire Charred existence and desire. It died low, ceased its…

    • Janet Lewis, “Winter Garden”

      Child, dream of a pomegranate tree Weighted with ruby, showered with gold, Dream of a fig tree under the cold And cloudy sky Lifting its curved and silver boughs Like a roofless house For birds that be Tardily in November here; Dream of a spare And twisted vine – The grape – and ivy for…

    • Hart Crane, “Voyages #1”

      Above the fresh ruffles of the surf Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand. They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks, And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed Gaily digging and scattering. And in answer to their treble interjections The sun beats lightning on the waves, The waves fold thunder on the…

    • Yvor Winters, “The Slow Pacific Swell”

      Far out of sight forever stands the sea, Bounding the land with pale tranquillity. When a small child, I watched it from a hill At thirty miles or more. The vision still Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away: The rain has washed the dust from April day; Paint-brush and lupine lie against…

    • Stevie Smith, “Dirge”

      From a friend’s friend I taste friendship, From a friend’s friend love, My spirit in confusion, Long years I strove, But now I know that never Nearer I shall move, Than a friend’s friend to friendship, To love than a friend’s love. Into the dark night Resignedly I go, I am not so afraid of…

    • The Great Myths #10: The Book of Invasions (Celtic)

      An episode from 7/7/21: In this third episode on Celtic mythology, I read a summary of that massive work of poetry and prose that combined the efforts of generations’ of medieval Irish scholars and earlier storytellers into a weird, brilliant and ungainly whole: the Lebor Gabála Érenn, otherwise known as the Book of Invasions. I also…

    • Kathleen Raine, “Two Invocations of Death”

      I Death, I repent Of these hands and feet That for forty years Have been my own And I repent Of flesh and bone, Of heart and liver, Of hair and skin – Rid me, death, Of face and form, Of all that I am. And I repent Of the forms of thought, The habit…

    • Richard Eberhardt, “This Fevers Me”

      This fevers me, this sun on green, On grass glowing, this young spring. The secret hallowing is come, Regenerate sudden incarnation, Mystery made visible In growth, yet subtly veiled in all, Ununderstandable in grass, In flowers, and in the human heart, This lyric mortal loveliness, The earth breathing, and the sun. The young lambs sport,…

    • Whitman’s Love Poetry // Whitman & Sex

      An episode from 4/9/22: Is Whitman our great poet of love, or of longing? Is there a difference? In this episode, I share my favorite of his love poems, many of which are expressed as unfulfilled longing. They can all be found in ⁠The Selected Short Poems of Walt Whitman⁠, and ⁠The Selected Long Poems of Walt…

    • Kenneth Rexroth, “Spring, Coast Range”

      The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless, The circle of white ash widens around it. I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw; The moon has come before…

    • Ted Hughes: 6 Poems from “River” (new episode)

      An episode from 2/7/24: Tonight, I read six poems from Ted Hughes’s 1983 collection, River. His books Crow, Moortown Diary, Remains of Elmet, and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that I read from River…

    • Stephen Spender, “I think continually of those who were truly great”

      I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns, Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire, Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song. And who hoarded…

    • Notes from the Grid: Rediscovering the Hidden Life

      An episode from 4/26/22: Tonight, I begin a five-part series called Notes from the Grid. (A print version of NFTG has since been published.) In this first part, figures as various as Kurt Cobain, Michelangelo, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Albert Einstein are called on to ask: why do so few of us find meaning in private experiences,…

    • Kenneth Patchen, “Street Corner College”

      Next year the grave grass will cover us. We stand now, and laugh; Watching the girls go by; Betting on slow horses; drinking cheap gin. We have nothing to do; nowhere to go; nobody. Last year was a year ago; nothing more. We weren’t younger then; nor older now. We manage to have the look…

    • Louis MacNeice, “Wolves”

      I do not want to be reflective any more Envying and despising unreflective things Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand Flushed, by the children’s bedtime, level with the shore. The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want To…

    • The Great Myths #5: Osiris

      An episode from 2/7/21: In this second episode on Egyptian mythology, I offer an overview of the story of the god Osiris, with readings from the most complete Egyptian and Greek sources. As with so much of the surviving corpus of Egyptian religious writings, hardly any attention is paid to our idea of a coherent…

    • Vernon Watkins, “Peace in the Welsh Hills”

      Calm is the landscape when the storm has passed, Brighter the fields, and fresh with fallen rain. Where gales beat out new colour from the hills Rivers fly faster, and upon their banks Birds preen their wings, and irises revive. Not so the cities burnt alive with fire Of man’s destruction: when their smoke is…

    • Anthology: Poems About Being a Parent (new episode)

      An episode from 1/31/24: Tonight, as a companion to last episode of poems on being a child, I read a handful of poems about being a parent: You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young…

    • James Agee, “So it begins. Adam is in his earth”

      So it begins. Adam is in his earth. Tempted, and fallen, and his doom made sure Oh, in the very instant of his birth: Whose deathly nature must all things endure. The hungers of his flesh, and mind, and heart, That governed him when he was in the womb, Those ravenings multiply in every part:…

    • Norman MacCaig, “Aunt Julia”

      Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic very loud and very fast. I could not answer her – I could not understand her. She wore men’s boots when she wore any. – I can see her strong foot, stained with peat, paddling with the treadle of the spinningwheel while her right hand drew yarn marvellously out of the…

    • Theodore Roethke, “Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, & Frau Schwartze”

      Gone the three ancient ladies Who creaked on the greenhouse ladders, Reaching up white strings To wind, to wind The sweet-pea tendrils, the smilax, Nasturtiums, the climbing Roses, to straighten Carnations, red Chrysanthemums; the stiff Stems, jointed like corn, They tied and tucked, – These nurses of nobody else. Quicker than birds, they dipped Up…

    • George Barker, “To My Mother”

      Most near, most dear, most loved and most far, Under the window where I often found her Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter, Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand, Irresistible as Rabelais, but most tender for The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her,– She is a procession no one…

    • Oppenheimer & the Bomb

      An episode from 7/21/23: Tonight, I read a few dozen quotations from the scientists, politicians, and military figures who were instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb, and in the final decision to drop it on Japan in August of 1945. The most prominent voices here are those of Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow…

    • Elizabeth Bishop, “The Shampoo”

      The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you’ve been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical; and look what happens. For Time…

    • Bryan Edward Helton, “That Old Dream”

           often returning into that old dream… …where the summer rain has made a mist     that drifts over sunlit pavement… …where the cool milk of lastlight is poured       into the empty bowl of the sky     and children scatter and one returning alone stands in the dark outside a lighted window motionless and lost in…

    • 2 Poems for the Holocaust

      An episode from 9/19/21: Are some topics not fit for poetry and art? Does the intentional crafting of atrocity and genocide into stanzas, scenes, rhymes, drama, or just DVD covers or posters, exploit and cheapen history? Or is this simply the way stories are told and passed down? Tonight, I talk about this in relation…

    • R. S. Thomas, “Affinity”

      Consider this man in the field beneath, Gaitered with mud, lost in his own breath, Without joy, without sorrow. Without children, without wife, Stumbling insensitively from furrow to furrow, A vague somnambulist: but hold your tears, For his name also is written in the Book of Life. Ransack your brainbox, pull out the drawers That…

    • Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”

      Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I…

    • Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”

      The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that…

    • Anthology: Poems About Childhood & Youth (new episode)

      An episode from 1/19/24: Tonight, I read a handful of poems about childhood. How does poetry capture our earliest memories, and how can it express the act of remembering itself, of nostalgia? The poems are: You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To…

    • Richard Wilbur, “In Trackless Woods”

      In trackless woods, it puzzled me to find Four great rock maples seemingly aligned, As if they had been set out in a row Before some house a century ago, To edge the property and lend some shade. I looked to see if ancient wheels had made Old ruts to which the trees ran parallel,…

    • Delmore Schwartz, “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave”

      In the naked bed, in Plato’s cave, Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall, Carpenters hammered under the shaded window, Wind troubled the window curtains all night long, A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding, Their freights covered, as usual. The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram Slid slowly forth.        Hearing the milkman’s chop, His striving…

    • The Earliest Bookstores I Remember // Picasso’s “Guernica”

      An episode from 3/2/22: At a listener’s request, the first part of this episode is devoted to the earliest bookstores I remember, from childhood through adolescence. The Friday night in high school that I spent, buying a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, remains an especially formative experience. The second part of this episode takes…

    • Laurie Lee, “Milkmaid”

      The girl’s far treble, muted to the heat, calls like a fainting bird across the fields to where her flock lies panting for her voice, their black horns buried deep in marigolds. They climb awake, like drowsy butterflies, and press their red flanks through the tall branched grass, and as they go their wandering tongues…

    • Robert Lowell, “Bobby Delano”

      The labor to breathe that younger, rawer air: St. Mark’s last football game with Groton lost on the ice-crust, the sunlight gilding the golden polo coats of boys with country seats on the Upper Hudson. Why does that stale light stay? First Form hazing, first day being sent on errands by an oldboy, Bobby Delano,…

    • Charles Causley, “Eden Rock”

      They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet. My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over…

    • American Shaman

      An episode from 7/7/23: Tonight, I talk about writing my long poem, ⁠To the House of the Sun⁠, published in 2015. The poem follows an Irish immigrant making his way through the American South, North and West, during the Civil War. The book is part travelogue, battle epic, and spiritual biography, and after describing how…

    • Elma Mitchell, “Thoughts after Ruskin”

      Women reminded him of lilies and roses. Me they remind rather of blood and soap, Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses, Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places: Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver, Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap, Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving, Scalding, blanching, broiling,…

    • Ted Hughes: 7 Poems from “Moortown Diary” (new episode)

      An episode from 1/10/24: Tonight, I read seven poems from Ted Hughes’s collection of farming poems, Moortown Diary, first published in 1978: This is a revision and complete re-recording of an episode first posted in January of 2021, which included only five poems. I’ve used the opportunity to read from Hughes’s preface and notes to…

    • Philip Larkin, “Here”

      Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows And traffic all night north; swerving through fields Too thin and thistled to be called meadows, And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants, And the widening river’s slow presence, The piled gold clouds,…

    • Karen Gershon, “I Was Not There”

      The morning they set out from home I was not there to comfort them the dawn was innocent with snow in mockery – it is not true the dawn was neutral was immune their shadows threaded it too soon they were relieved that it had come I was not there to comfort them One told…

    • Denise Levertov, “A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England”

      Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernarvon, and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps, I am Essex-born: Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel, the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,…

    • Allen Ginsberg, from “Kaddish”

      For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956IIIOnly to have not forgotten the beginning in which she drank cheap sodas in the morgues of Newark,only to have seen her weeping on gray tables in long wards of her universeonly to have known the weird ideas of Hitler at the door, the wires in her head, the three big sticksrammed…

    • Advice from Charles Dickens & Alice Munro (from the archive)

      An episode from 1/10/23: Tonight, we hear from two great writers of fiction, Charles Dickens and Alice Munro. Through a handful of readings from Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life, we see how Dickens (1812-1870) was able to juggle, for almost a year, the writing of two novels simultaneously, both for serial publication. Thanks to a…

    • Philip Levine, “Among Children”

      I walk among the rows of bowed heads – the children are sleeping through fourth grade so as to be ready for what is ahead, the monumental boredom of junior high and the rush forward tearing their wings loose and turning their eyes forever inward. These are the children of Flint, their fathers work at…

    • Galway Kinnell, “Tillamook Journal”

      I have come here From Chicago, packing A sleeping bag, a pan To melt snow for drinking, Dried apricots, tea, A great boiled beef-heart. Two loggers drove me As far in as they could get, Two gunnysack loggers of the Burn, Owning a truck and a dozer, a few cables And saws, who drag out…

    • Molly Holden, “Photograph of a Haymaker, 1890”

      It is not so much the image of the man that’s moving – he pausing from his work to whet his scythe, trousers tied below the knee, white shirt lit by another summer’s sun, another century’s – as the sight of the grasses beyond his last laid swathe, so living yet upon the moment previous…

    • The Sound of Beethoven (new episode)

      You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.

    • George Theiner, “The Fly”

      translated from the original by Miroslav Holub She sat on a willow-trunk watching part of the battle of Crécy, the shouts, the gasps, the groans, the tramping and the tumbling. During the fourteenth charge of the French cavalry she mated with a brown-eyed male fly from Vadincourt. She rubbed her legs together as she sat…

    • Peter Porter, “Eat Early Earthapples”

      There were boys at my Prep. School my own age And three stone heavier, who made fifty pounds Over the holidays selling kangaroo hides They’d skinned and pegged out themselves On their fathers’ stations. Many shaved, several Slept with the maids – one I remember Running his hand up the Irish maid’s leg At breakfast…

    • The Voice of Toni Morrison (from the archive)

      An episode from 6/26/22: We are incredibly lucky that, in the novelist Toni Morrison (1931-2019), we had that rare thing: a great writer who also achieved great popularity with the general public. This meant that she was interviewed about her life, her books, and about creativity and the news of the day, hundreds of times.…

    • Roy Fisher, “The Entertainment of War”

      I saw the garden where my aunt had died And her two children and a woman from next door; It was like a burst pod filled with clay. A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging…

    • Derek Walcott, “Tales of the Islands #10”

      “adieu foulard…” I watched the island narrowing the fine Writing of foam around the precipices, then The roads as small and casual as twine Thrown on its mountains; I watched till the plane Turned to the final north and turned above The open channel with the grey sea between The fishermen’s islets until all that…

    • Ted Hughes, “Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days”

      She gives him his eyes, she found themAmong some rubble, among some beetles He gives her her skinHe just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over herShe weeps with fearfulness and astonishment She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wristsThey are amazed at…

    • Gillian Clarke, “Overheard in County Sligo”

      I married a man from County Roscommon and I live in the back of beyond with a field of cows and a yard of hens and six white geese on the pond. At my door’s a square of yellow corn caught up by its corners and shaken, and the road runs down through the open…

    • Michael Longley, “The Butchers”

      When he had made sure there were no survivors in his house And that all the suitors were dead, heaped in blood and dust Like fish that fishermen with fine-meshed nets have hauled Up gasping for salt water, evaporating in the sunshine, Odysseus, spattered with muck and like a lion dripping blood From his chest…

    • Ted Kooser, “Late February”

      The first warm day, and by mid-afternoon the snow is no more than a washing strewn over the yards, the bedding rolled in knots and leaking water, the white shirts lying under the evergreens. Through the heaviest drifts rise autumn’s fallen bicycles, small carnivals of paint and chrome, the Octopus and Tilt-A-Whirl beginning to turn…

    • Anthology: Poems on How to Live (from the archive)

      An episode from 1/26/23: Tonight I read a handful of poems on the theme of How to live, what to do? How to get by in the world as a devotee of culture, solitude, ritual, beauty, tradition and individuality? There is of course no one answer, and anyway, poetry should stay as far away from…

    • Britain: September 3, 1939 (new episode)

      An episode from 12/21/23: What is it like for your country to declare war, and then wait for it, and then live through it? Tonight, I read only a small sampling from Norman Longmate’s How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War. The book focuses on the home front…

    • Seamus Heaney, “Bogland”

      for T. P. FlanaganWe have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening – Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights of the sun. They’ve taken the skeleton Of the Great Irish Elk Out…

    • Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, “Swineherd”

      When all this is over, said the swineherd, I mean to retire, where Nobody will have heard about my special skills And conversation is mainly about the weather. I intend to learn how to make coffee, at least as well As the Portuguese lay-sister in the kitchen And polish the brass fenders every day. I…

    • Derek Mahon, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”

      Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels. – Seferis, Mythistorema for J. G. Farrell Even now there are places where a thought might grow – Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned To a slow clock of condensation, An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft, Indian…

    • Louise Glück, “Brown Circle”

      My mother wants to know why, if I hate family so much, I went ahead and had one. I don’t answer my mother. What I hated was being a child, having no choice about what people I loved. I don’t love my son the way I meant to love him. I thought I’d be the…

    • Eavan Boland, “Irish Poetry”

      for Michael HartnettWe always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland. No music stored at the doors of hell. No god to make it. No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it. But I remember an evening when the sky was dark at four. When ice had seized every part of the city…

    • Van Gogh’s Early Years (from the archive)

      An episode from 12/7/22: Tonight, we enter into the early years of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), from his birth in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands, to his time in the Borinage mining region of Belgium. It was there, at the age of twenty-seven—and after years of personal and professional failures—that he hit bottom…

    • Paul Muldoon, “Why Brownlee Left”

      Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee…

    • The new movie “Maestro,” & what happens to our earliest dreams (new episode)

      An episode from 12/13/23: There’s a certain lesson I’ve learned from sports figures, poets, and critics, and I was reminded of it while watching Bradley Cooper’s new movie about Leonard Bernstein, Maestro. What does it mean that the attention and opportunities that so many aspiring musicians and conductors dream of, only ever lands on a…

    • Sean O’Brien, “Cousin Coat”

      You are my secret coat. You’re never dry.You wear the weight and stink of black canals.Malodorous companion, we know whyIt’s taken me so long to see we’re pals,To learn why my acquaintance never sniffOr send me notes to say I stink of stiff. But you don’t talk, historical bespoke.You must be worn, be intimate as…

    • Laurie Sheck, “The Stockroom”

      I watch the boy shoot up. His head woozes back, eyes fluttering lightly into what land, what dreamy repetition, separateness, deferment, grainy black and white of this sleep that is not sleep? He closes his eyes but I still watch. I am a child, I don’t know who he is, or how he’s wandered back…

    • Alice Oswald, “Various Portents”

      Various stars. Various kings. Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights. Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers, Much cold, much overbearing darkness. Various long midwinter Glooms. Various Solitary and Terrible Stars. Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers. Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars. More than one North Star, more than…

    • The Internet will Get You Too

      A post from a few years ago that is worth revisiting: I began this blog in earnest almost six years now, with a post called “Silence in London,” which offered a handful of photos from a recent trip to England. I only made that post, though, because during the trip I left a long comment…

    • Not Quite Nostalgia (new essay)

      Probably the most personal thing I’ll publish for a very long time, written a few years ago: To save a few dozens charges at iTunes, I’ve begun requesting CDs from the library so I can copy songs from my adolescence that I’ve lost track of over the last twenty years. I brought one home the…

    • The Great Myths #68: The Dark Home of Night & Death (Greek)

      Read the other Great Myths here Here, in order, are the ends and springs Of gloomy earth and misty Tartarus, And of the barren sea and starry heaven, Murky and awful, loathed by the very gods. There is the yawning mouth of hell, and if A man should find himself inside the gates, He would…

    • The Great Myths #67: The Origin of the Buffalo Dance (Blackfoot)

      Read the other Great Myths here George Bird Grinnell’s classic account (from 1892) of the origin of the Blackfoot Buffalo Dance. It culminates with the buffalo freely offering themselves to the Blackfoot tribe, but only after teaching them the dance that will resurrect the buffalo herds: The people had built a great pis’kun [a buffalo…

    • The Great Myths #63: Ragnarok (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths here from the Prose Edda: Then spoke Gangleri: ‘What information is there to be given about Ragnarok? I have not heard tell of this before.’       High said: ‘There are many important things to be told about it. First of all that a winter will come called fimbul-winter [mighty or…

    • Seamus Heaney, from “Squarings”

      The center of Seeing Things—and perhaps the very center of his poetry, and maybe even his greatest achievement—is the sequence called “Squarings,” which consists of forty-eight twelve-line poems. He never wrote about nature, history, myth, other poets, or his own rural upbringing so well. This week I will post my favorite poems from each of…

    • Seamus Heaney, from “Crossings”

      The center of Seeing Things—and perhaps the very center of his poetry, and maybe even his greatest achievement—is the sequence called “Squarings,” which consists of forty-eight twelve-line poems. He never wrote about nature, history, myth, other poets, or his own rural upbringing so well. This week I will post my favorite poems from each of…

    • Seamus Heaney, from “Settings”

      The center of Seeing Things—and perhaps the very center of his poetry, and maybe even his greatest achievement—is the sequence called “Squarings,” which consists of forty-eight twelve-line poems. He never wrote about nature, history, myth, other poets, or his own rural upbringing so well. This week I will post my favorite poems from each of…

    • Seamus Heaney, from “Lightenings”

      The center of Seeing Things—and perhaps the very center of his poetry, and maybe even his greatest achievement—is the sequence called “Squarings,” which consists of forty-eight twelve-line poems. He never wrote about nature, history, myth, other poets, or his own rural upbringing so well. This week I will post my favorite poems from each of…

    • The Great Myths #62: Loki is Captured & Punished (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths here Then spoke Gangleri: “It was quite an achievement of Loki’s when he brought it about first of all that Baldr was killed, and also that he was not redeemed from Hel. But was he punished at all for this?” High said: “He was requited for this in such a…

    • The Great Myths #61: Thor Goes Fishing for the World Serpent (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths here Thor went out across Midgard having assumed the appearance of a young boy, and arrived one evening at nightfall at a certain giant’s; his name was Hymir. Thor stayed there as a guest for the night. And at dawn Hymir got up and dressed and got ready to row…

    • The Great Myths #60: The History of Odin’s Horse (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths here Then spoke Gangleri: “Whose is the horse Sleipnir? And what is there to tell about it?”       High said: “You do not know details of Sleipnir and are not acquainted with the circumstances of its origin!—but you will find this worth listening to. It was right at the beginning…

    • Seamus Heaney, “The Strand at Lough Beg” (An Elegy from the Troubles)

      Seamus Heaney, “The Strand at Lough Beg” In Memory of Colum McCartney All round this little island, on the strand Far down below there, where the breakers strive Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand. – Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100-3 Leaving the white glow of filling stations And a few lonely streetlamps among fields…

    • The Great Myths #59: Odin Talks About Valhalla (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths here Then spoke Gangleri: “You say that all those men that have fallen in battle since the beginning of the world have now come to Odin in Val-hall. What has he got to offer them for food? 1 should have thought that there must be a pretty large number there.”…

    • The Great Myths #58: The Love Story of Freyr & the Giantess Gerd (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths here [High said:]“There was someone called Gymir, and his wife Aurboda. She was of the race of mountain-giants. Gerd is their daughter, the most beautiful of all women. It happened one day that Freyr had gone into Hlidskialf and was looking over all worlds, and when he looked to the…

    • The Great Myths #57: Loki’s Monstrous Children (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths here High continued: “And Loki had other offspring too. There was a giantess called Angrboda in Giantland. With her Loki had three children. One was Fenriswolf, the second Iormungand (i.e. the Midgard serpent), the third is Hel. And when the gods realized that these three siblings were being brought up…

    • Seamus Heaney’s “Beowulf”

      From the end of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, here is an immense mourning for a person and a civilization, the sound of all of society at war: The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf, stacked and decked it until it stood four-square, hung with helmets, heavy war-shields and shining armour, just as he…

    • Wordsworth, from “Poems on the Naming of Places”

      Wordsworth, from “Poems on the Naming of Places It was an April Morning: fresh and clear The Rivulet, delighting in its strength, Ran with a young man’s speed, and yet the voice Of waters which the winter had supplied Was softened down into a vernal tone, The spirit of enjoyment and desire, And hopes and…

    • Bone Antler Stone by Tim Miller: Book Review

      Originally posted on Kathryn MacDonald : Tim Miller collapses 30,000 years of archaeology into a poetry collection that feels the thrill of immediate experience. He stirs a bit of magic, weaving it into the facts of what we know from long-past history. In “Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira” (France and Spain, 35,000 – 12,000 BC), Miller writes:…

    • Ted Hughes – “Crow’s Song about God”

      Ted Hughes – “Crow’s Song about God” Somebody is sittingUnder the gatepost of heavenUnder the lintelOn which are written the words: “Forbidden to the living.”A knot of eyes, eyeholes, lifeless, in the life-shapeA rooty old oak-stump, aground in the oozeOf some putrid estuary,Snaggy with amputations,His fingernails broken and bitten,His hair vestigial and purposeless, his toenails…

    • Translating Kafka’s Life: An Interview with Shelley Frisch

      I have posted about my love for Franz Kafka’s work many times in these pages. Today I’m lucky enough to talk with Shelley Frisch about translating Reiner Stach’s three-volume biography of Kafka into English. Frisch holds a Ph.D. in German literature from Princeton University, taught at Columbia University and Haverford College, where she served as…

    • The Unfinished Kafka

      Reiner Stach, in the middle entry of his three volume biography of Franz Kafka, writes, “Anyone who studies bibliographies today will envy Kafka’s earliest readers, who knew very little about his life and could enjoy his work as literature and not as an accumulation of autobiographical codes.” (186) Stach’s biography (and its beautiful translation into…

    • Blindness, War & History

      (this essay was originally published in the Fall, 2014 issue of the Concho River Review. Since it is no longer available for purchase, I will post the essay here)  when you kill another honor him with your tears when the battle is won treat it as a wake —Tao Te Ching 31, tr. Red Pine…

    • Heaney Comes to Poetry

      Here are some of Seamus Heaney’s memories of reading, writing, and poetry, from earliest schooldays to university, all taken from Dennis O’Driscoll’s wonderful book-length interview with him,  Stepping Stones. Yes, my memory of learning to read goes back to my first days in Anahorish School, the charts for the letters, the big-lettered reading books. But…

    • Week of the Bomb: Friday

      What to make of any of these voices? This week’s posts—the words not of those protesting the bomb after, but of those who made and decided to use it—are the sum of something I have wanted to put together, quite literally, for years, and talking with my wife about each of them has convinced me…

    • Week of the Bomb: Thursday

      Finally, voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When The New Yorker dedicated its entire August 31, 1946 issue to John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the editors wrote that they did so “in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to…

    • Week of the Bomb: Wednesday

      Many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project had families in Europe, or were refugees from Europe themselves, and so the atomic bomb they were helping to make had an obvious adversary in mind. When Germany surrendered, however, many felt much less animus against Japan, and in part this conflict is narrated in…

    • Week of the Bomb: Tuesday

      Impossible decisions remain impossible, even after they’ve been made. Following on yesterday’s post, here are the voices of those scientists and politicians who admitted the horror of the atomic bomb, but saw its creation and deployment as unavoidable; who felt caught up and even powerless in the equally inevitable march of scientific discovery; those who…

    • Week of the Bomb: Monday

      With the anniversary of the Trinity Test just passed, and the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week, I realize the atomic bomb has been following me for years. The first book of poetry I ever owned was the anthology Atomic Ghosts, which featured dozens of poets responding to the nuclear age; and after I first…

    • Heaney on Writing

      Here’s Seamus Heaney talking about writing, from Dennis O’Driscoll’s book-length interview with him, Stepping Stones: On Inspiration On the week in May 1969 when he wrote “about forty poems”: It was a visitation, an onset, and as such, powerfully confirming. This you felt, was “it.” You had been initiated into the order of the inspired.…

    • The Best of Albert Camus’s Notebooks

      A random scattering, some barely aphorisms, from the first two volumes of the notebooks of Albert Camus. They are gold: One must not cut oneself off from the world. No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life. My whole effort, whatever the situation, misfortune or disillusion, must be to make…

    • History is An Accident

      from Peter Ackroyd, at the end of his first volume on the history of England: When we look over the course of human affairs we are more likely than not to find only error and confusion. I have already explained, in the course of this narrative, that the writing of history is often another way…

    • What To Expect When You’re in Love with a Writer

      When in 1937 the mythologist Joseph Campbell began dating his future wife, the dancer Jean Erdman, he gave her a copy of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, an odd courtship gift indeed. While visiting Erdman’s family, they discussed the book. Later: …At the end of a pleasant evening Joseph offered to walk Jean home;…

    • A Housewife in the 1960s

      One of the saddest interviews from Studs Terkel’s Working (talk about Human Pages!) comes from a Chicago housewife named Therese Carter: How would I describe myself? It’ll sound terrible—just a housewife. (Laughs.) It’s true. What is a housewife? You don’t have to have any special talents. I don’t have any….       It’s not really a…

    • There is Only the Trying: Some Thoughts on Fame & Failure

      A reader favorite from 2016, that I like to repost now & then: 1. When Derek Jeter retired from baseball in the fall of 2014, those who followed his last season heard the unsurprising story that he’d wanted to be shortstop for the New York Yankees since he was a little boy. And as I…

    • 5 Elegies by Seamus Heaney

      from “Clearances” When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little pleasant…

    • Picasso & Sex

      from John Richardson’s biography of Picasso: When questioned much later about his earliest sexual experience, Picasso claimed that his sex life had started very early on: “Yes,” he says smiling, with a sparkle in his eye, “I was still quite small”—and he indicated a diminutive height wit his hand. “Obviously I didn’t wait for the…

    • Voices from 1900-1914

      Below are a few dozen voices from the early twentieth century, culled from Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914. In an almost uncanny way their concerns aren’t much different than ours: there’s worry over the spread of new technology and its invasion into and cheapening of everyday life; a deep paranoia over changes in…

    • Primo Levi’s Hardest Thoughts on the Holocaust

      From Primo Levi’s 1986 book, The Drowned and the Saved, remembering the concentration camps: On Levi’s own—and others’—guilt at having survived the concentration camps: At a distance of years one can today definitely affirm that the history of the Lagers [from Konzentrationslager, concentration camp] has been written almost exclusively by those who, like myself, never…

    • Who are These Faces & What are Their Stories?

      At an antique store a few years ago, I spent $10 on an envelope of old photos. I love to imagine their stories, and thought others might too. And perhaps someone out there knows them? Click on the slideshow to begin:

    • The Great Myths #55: An Island is Cut Away & the Prose Edda Begins (Norse)

        Read the other Great Myths here The Prose Edda, one of the greatest sources for Norse mythology, begins with the following simple frame story: a king named Gylfi is tricked out of a good deal of his land, and he goes to the home of the gods to question them. His questions, and the…

    • Sleepwalking into World War One

      From Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914: Do we really need to make the case against a single guilty state, or to rank the states according to their respective share in responsibility for the outbreak of war? In one classical study from the origins literature, Paul Kennedy remarked that it…

    • The Great Myths #54: A Native American Orpheus (Tachi Yokut)

      Read the other Great Myths here As the compiler of this myth notes: “The Orpheus myth is also popular among North American Indian tribes, especially in the western and eastern parts of the continent.” A Tachi had a fine wife who died and was buried. Her husband went to her grave and dug a hole…

    • The Great Myths #53: Thor Goes Fishing for the Serpent that Surrounds the World (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths here Long ago the slaughter-gods were eating their hunting-prey in the mood for a drink, before they were full; they shook the sticks and looked at the lots: they learned that at Ægir’s was a fine crop of cauldrons. The cliff-dweller [Ægir] sat there, child-cheerful, much like Miskorblindi’s boy; the…

    • The Great Myths #52: Ríg Gives Advice (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths here Here is Andy Orchard’s translation of the Rígsthula, where the culture hero Ríg wanders the earth & sorts everybody out: People say that in the ancient tales one of the Æsir, who was called Heimdall, went in his travels along a certain sea-shore; he came to a farmstead and…

    • The Great Myths #51: Enkidu in the Underworld (Mesopotamian)

      Read the other Great Myths Here Just before his death, Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu dreams of the Underworld. While what remains of the story is fragmentary, it is remarkable in part for being one of the earliest descriptions in literature of an Underworld. In this case, it is less a place of punishment than one of…

    • Poems from Columbine: “The Mother”

      The Mother at the Salon She was at the salon hours after another mother sat in the same seat: a victim’s mother, she a perpetrator’s. Yet it wasn’t warmer or more desolate to sit where her seeming opposite had sat, both readying for a funeral or both seeking what only old habit could give. Both…

    • Poems from Columbine: “The Two of Them”

      The Two of Them They grew up with Waco, weird religion rolled over by tanks and set on fire; they grew up with Oklahoma City, white guy rage and middle-American bombs and a scalloped building seen from overhead, some cross-section into safe offices safe no more and blown out to the street below. They may…

    • Poems from Columbine: “Infatuation”

      Infatuation She’d be nearing middle age by now, the girl all over Dylan’s journal whose name the books all black out, the girl no girl wants to be, loved by him, the boy she would never write about herself unless she loved nervousness and decay or was taken in by weakness and doubt, her head…

    • “One day the Gestapo hanged a child”: God on Trial at Auschwitz

      The oldest book about religion on my shelves is Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. The note inside still says that I read it in the fall of 1996, just after I turned seventeen. I’m lucky that I found Armstrong’s book so early for many reasons, but mostly for the following story she tells, which…

    • The Great Myths #50: Aeneas in the Underworld (Roman)

      Read the other Great Myths Here In an immensely moving scene, after traveling to the underworld, Aeneas encounters his deceased father there: But in the deep of a green valley, father Anchises, lost in thought, was studying the souls of all his sons to come – though now imprisoned, destined for the upper light. And…

    • Hart Crane, High & Low

      Here is one the my favorite moments from a writer’s life, followed by one of the saddest. Only seven months apart, they typify the pendulum of great highs and awful lows in Hart Crane’s life. Desperate to write, and giving in his letters as articulate a record of that burning desire as any writer I…

    • Joyce’s Dirty Letters

      When James Joyce returned to Ireland in the closing months of 1909, leaving his wife Nora Barnacle in Trieste, it was the first time they had been apart for so long since they had fled Ireland together in 1904. Their separation, prompted by a business scheme Joyce hoped to succeed in, instead gifted the world…

    • Yeats Discovers Poetry

      Here’s W. B. Yeats recalling his earliest experiences of poetry: ….This may have come from the stable-boy, for he was my principal friend. He had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on I can…

    • Yeats Comes to the Occult

      Here is W. B. Yeats, remembering some of his early experiences with the occult and supernatural. All taken from his The Trembling of the Veil, collected in Autobiographies: When staying with Hyde in Roscommon, I had driven over to Lough Kay, hoping to find some local memory of the old story of Tumaus Costello, which…

    • Joyce & Proust Meet

      From that greatest of literary biographies, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, here is the account of Joyce meeting Marcel Proust, only a few months before Proust’s death: On May 18, 1922, Sydney Schiff (“Stephen Hudson”), the English novelist whom Joyce had met a few times, invited him to a supper party for Stravinsky and Diaghilev following…

    • The Great Myths #49: Odin Sacrifices Himself (Norse)

      Read the other Great Myths Here Here are a handful of translations of verses 138-145 of the Hávamál, found in the Poetic or Elder Edda. The Hávamál is a loose collection of sayings and advice – at times cryptic and at times playful – all attributed to Odin. Among the more cryptic parts, these verses…

    • The Great Myths #48: Creation as a Question (Hindu)

      Here is the great Nāsadīya hymn, from the Rig Veda, where the mystery of creation is illustrated by a collection of unanswerable questions: There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? There…

    • Hart Crane & His Father

      In early January, 1924, the poet Hart Crane, twenty-four and basically broke, received a letter from his father offering to hire him into the family business. To a friend, Crane wrote, “Along comes a letter from my father this morning offering me a position with him as travelling salesman! This is unacceptable, of course, even…

    • T. S. Eliot & His Father

      Here is a favorite bit from a youthful T. S. Eliot (he’s just turned thirty but that’s young to me now). After leaving America for England and abandoning the job at Harvard his family was expecting of him, he made an unfortunate marriage and started a literary life of day job, essays and reviews. He…

    • The Goddess Instructs the Gods (Kena Upanishad)

      Here’s one of my favorite bits from the Hindu Upanishads, chapters three and four from the Kena Upanishad. The goddess Una takes the male gods to school:   Brahman, according to the story, obtained a victory for the gods; and by that victory of Brahman the gods became elated. They said to themselves: “Verily, this…

    • Robert Oppenheimer (poem)

      Robert Oppenheimer Now I come to write in light and firein a language of power we all know,beyond every letter and poetryand all the dithering of philosophy,all the prevarication of politics.The physicists have known sin, it’s true,but also the brilliance of a burden overcome in the ageless mountains,a foul display that was beyond awesome,beyond my…

    • “Bone Antler Stone” reviewed in the Big Windows Review

      Many thanks to Tom Zimmerman at The Big Windows Review for his review of Bone Antler Stone. I’ve pasted an excerpt below, and you can read the entire review here. Excerpts and reviews from the book are here. “… [Bone Antler Stone] is an act of powerful sympathetic imagination that forges a connection between lost cultures…

    • “Bone Antler Stone” on NPR

      Many thanks to Bill O’Driscoll and Pittsburgh’s 90.5 WESA for interviewing me about Bone Antler Stone. You can listen to an audio interview, with a longer story on their website, here. Excerpts and reviews from the book are here.

    • Female Figurines and a Shipwreck: Two Poems from “Bone Antler Stone”

      Here are two of my favorite poems from Bone Antler Stone: one on the famous ice age “Venus” figurines from 20-30,000 years ago, and another on a shipwreck from 1300 BC. You can order the entire collection here, or find more poems from the book here. Female Figurines for Evie Hum the words with me and…

    • Review: Bone Antler Stone by Tim Miller

      Originally posted on Riggwelter: Miller, Tim, Bone Antler Stone, High Window Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780-2440-0959-5. £9.99 As the title might suggest, (pre)history and nature feature strongly in Tim Miller’s collection Bone Stone Antler (The High Window Press), but also song, fire, life. The collection has four sections: Landscapes & Rituals, Burials (which I found particularly moving), Artefacts…

    • The Great Myths #47: Sacred Language & the Limitation of Words (Taoism)

      Two chapters from the Tao Te Ching, and each in three different translations, on the limitations of even the best words: Tao Te Ching #70 My sayings are very easy to recognize, and very easy to apply. But no one in the world can recognize them, and no one can apply them. Sayings have a…

    • The Great Myths #46: Sacred Language & Homer’s Poets (Greek)

      Here are two passages from Homer’s Odyssey featuring the common household bard of prehistoric Greece. The first poet, the description of which probably lent to the legend that Homer himself was blind, performs stories of the Trojan war before a disguised Odysseus, bringing him to tears. The second is the bard at Odysseus’ own home…

    • The Great Myths #45: Sacred Language Creates the World (Jewish)

      Four stories from the great Jewish tradition of the sacredness of the Torah, of Hebrew, and of the letters of the alphabet themselves: Creation by Word In the beginning a word was spoken by the mouth of God, and the heavens and the earth came into being, as it is said, By the word of…

    • The Great Myths #44: Sacred Language & Two Hymns to Speech (Hindu)

      Rig Veda 10:71: The Origins of Sacred Speech Bṛhaspati! When they set in motion the first beginning of speech, giving names, their most pure and perfectly guarded secret was revealed through love.       When the wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve, then friends recognized their…

    • The Great Myths #43 Sacred Language & the Story of Gwion Bach & Taliesin (Welsh)

      One of the longer myths I’ll post here, the following story is well worth it, and is indeed a master-class in mythology and folklore. Containing shape-changes, chase scenes, mysterious births, borrowed identities, and competitions of all kinds, it is in the best sense a holy mess, including its sudden and (to us) perhaps unsatisfying ending.…

    • Silence in London II: The Internet will Get You Too

      I began this blog in earnest almost six years now, with a post called “Silence in London,” which offered a handful of photos from a recent trip to England. I only made that post, though, because during the trip I left a long comment on a poetry blog, and found that it made me want…

    • The Great Myths #42: Sacred Language & the Story of Caedmon (Christian)

      A brother of the monastery is found to possess God’s gift of poetry [A. D. 680] In this monastery of Streanaeshalch lived a brother singularly gifted by God’s grace. So skilful was he in composing religious and devotional songs that, when any passage of Scripture was explained by interpreters, he could quickly turn it into…

    • The Great Myths #41: Sacred Language & the Mead of Poetry (Norse)

      …And Aegir went on: “How did this craft that you call poetry originate?” Bragi replied: “The origin of it was that the gods had a dispute with the people called Vanir, and they appointed a peace-conference and made a truce by this procedure, that both sides went up to a vat and spat their spittle…

    • Review: Bone Antler Stone by Tim Miller

      Originally posted on Amethyst Review: Bone Antler Stone by Tim Miller: High Window Press, 80pp ISBN 9780244009595 The scope of this collection is extraordinary, and the depth of research admirable. But Tim Miller’s poetry wears its learning well enough to draw in a non specialist reader. Prehistory is a gift to the poet in that…

    • The Great Myths #40: Enkidu Comes of Age (Mesopotamian)

      One of the greatest stories of a person “living in nature” becoming “civilized” is perhaps the earliest one. Also here is an intense ambivalence towards the role of women in civilization, as well as the gifts of urban life, such as bread and beer. By the time Enkidu encounters all of them, something has certainly…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 13: “The perfect image of a mighty mind, of one that feeds upon infinity”

      Here are excerpts from the last book of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude.  Other excerpts  are here.   In one of these excursions, travelling then Through Wales on foot and with a youthful friend, I left Bethkelet’s huts at couching-time, And westward took my way to see the sun Rise from the top of Snowdon. Having reading…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 12: “making verse deal boldly with substantial things”

      Throughout the summer I hope to post my favorite bits from Wordworth’s 1805 Prelude. Book 12 continues his meditations in Book 11, which was titled “Imagination, How Impaired & Restored.” Other excerpts are here.   Such benefit may souls of humblest frame Partake of, each in their degree; ’tis mine To speak of what myself…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 11: “Habits of devoutest sympathy”

      Excerpts from Book 11 of  Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, which he calls “Imagination, How Impaired and Restored.” Other excerpts are here.   Long time hath man’s unhappiness and guilt Defained us: with what dismal sights beset For the outward view, and inwardly oppressed With sorrow, disappointment, vexing thoughts, Confusion of the judgement, zeal decayed – And…

    • The Great Myths #39: Arrow Boy (Cheyenne)

      After the Cheyenne had received their corn, and while they were still in the north, a young man and woman of the tribe were married. The woman became pregnant and carried her child in the womb for four years. The people watched with great interest to see what would happen, and when the woman gave…

    • The Great Myths #38: Baldr’s Dreams, Baldr’s Death (Norse)

      Two bits of old Norse, first poetry & then prose, on the death of Odin’s son, Baldr: All at once the gods were gathered, and all the goddesses came to speak, the mighty deities had a discussion, why Baldr’s dreams were foreboding. Odin rose up, the ancient sacrifice, and on the Sleipnir placed a saddle;…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 10: “In the very world which is the world of all of us, the place in which, in the end, we find our happiness, or not at all”

      Excerpts from Book 10 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, where he concludes his story of being in France during the Revolution. Other excerpts are here.   A poor mistaken and bewildered offering,Should to the breast of Nature have gone back,With all my resolutions, all my hopes,A poet only to myself, to menUseless, and even, beloved friend,…

    • The Great Myths #37: Icarus Falls (Ovid & Virgil)

      But Daedalus was weary; by this time, he’d been exiled in Crete too long; he pined for his own land; but he was blocked – the sea stood in his way. “Though Minos bars escape by land or waves,” he said, “I still can take the sky – there lies my path. Though he owns…

    • Bone Antler Stone by Tim Miller, a review

      An immensely thorough & generous review of Bone Antler Stone was just posted by Daniel Paul Marshall, please go check it out. Many thanks to him.

    • The Great Myths #36: Parzival Grows Up & Leaves Home

      The sad early life of Parzival is narrated here. His father having died while out on crusade, his mother, Herzeloyde, tries to keep all knowledge of knighthood from her Parzival’s awareness. She retreats to the woods with a small retinue, and of course all of her attempts are in vain.    This lady [Herzeloyde] quick…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 9: “I saw the revolutionary power toss like a ship at anchor”

      Excerpts from Book 9 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, where he begins his story of being in France during the Revolution. Other excerpts are here.   ’Tis mine to tread The humbler province of plain history, And, without choice of circumstance, submissively Relate what I have heard. Book 9, 642-645 Oft then I said, And not…

    • “Bone Antler Stone”: A Reading List for Ancient Europe

      Here’s a roll call for all the books & scholars I gained so much from, in writing the poems in Bone Antler Stone. For some reason a handful are wildly expensive now, so I’ve put an asterisk before those that are still reasonably priced. Although as I discovered in collecting them all (sometimes only being…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 8: “A weight of ages did at once descend upon my heart”

      Excerpts from Book 8 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, which he titles “Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind.” Other excerpts are here.   With deep devotion, Nature, did I feel In that great city what I owed to thee: High thoughts of God and man, and love of man, Triumphant over all those loathsome…

    • “Bone Antler Stone” now available

      “Our prehistory now has its poet laureate.”– Barry Cunliffe, Oxford University Passing through more than thirty thousand years of history, the changing spiritual and material lives of the earliest Europeans are vividly imagined through their artwork, burials, architecture, and their interaction with the landscape, the seasons, and one another. Buy the book here Read an…

    • On “Bone Antler Stone”: Ancient Europe, the Narrow Book & Finding Poetry Again

      My poetry collection Bone Antler Stone—a panorama of ancient Europe from the painted caves of Lascaux to contact with Greece and Rome—comes out on Thursday. You can order it here. Here’s an essay on how it came to be written: The poems of Bone Antler Stone go way back, as a book about ancient history…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 7: “This parliament of monsters”

        Excerpts from Book 7 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his time living in London. Other excerpts are here.   Above all, one thought Baffled my understanding, how men lived Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still Strangers, and not knowing each other’s names. Book 7, 117-120   Shall I give way, Copying the…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 6: “No absence scarcely can there be, for those who love as we do.”

      Excerpts from Book 6 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his friendship with Coleridge. Other excerpts are here.   There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair, No languor, no dejection, no dismay, No absence scarcely can there be, for those Who love as we do. Book 6, 253-256 I too have been a wanderer, but,…

    • Speaking of Short Stories

      Back when I used to do a lot of readings, I would start out by sharing somebody else’s work, and I realize that I should do the equivalent of that with the release of my book of stories, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old. The person that comes to mind is the late William…

    • “The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old” now available

      My book of short stories, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, is now available. My essay on the book is here.  Order it directly from the publisher, Square, Small Press Distribution, and Amazon. Ebook links here. Please consider ordering directly from the publisher or Square. Each of the twelve stories is told by an…

    • There are a lot of lonely people out there, & they deserve a book of stories

      There are a lot of lonely people out there, and with my collection of stories The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old coming out on Monday (you can order it directly from the publisher, Square, Small Press Distribution, and Amazon), I want to write for a moment about why I devoted an entire book to…

    • Review of Hymns & Lamentations

      Check out the poet Tom Laichas’s review, here, of my 2011 book Hymns and Lamentations, a collection poems on the unsolvable religious problems of suffering and joy. It’s an immensely generous and thorough look at the book, probably the best it’s gotten so far. You can still order the book here.  

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 5: “Stirred to ecstasy by glittering verse”

      Excerpts from Book 5 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his love for books. Other excerpts are here.                                                         And yet it seems That here, in memory of all…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 4: “Need I say, dear friend, that to the brim my heart was full?”

        Excerpts from Book 4 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his time home from college. Other excerpts are here.   Why should I speak of what a thousand hearts Have felt, and every man alive can guess? Book 4: 33-34 Delighted did I take my place again At our domestic table; and, dear friend, Relating…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 3: “Unknown, unthought of, yet I was most rich”

      Excerpts from Book 3 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, on his years at Cambridge. Other excerpts are here.   Things they were which then I did not love, nor do I love them now: Such glory was but little sought by me, And little won. But it is right to say That even so early, from…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 2: “The self-sufficing power of solitude”

      Excerpts from Book 2 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude. Other excerpts are here.   Thus the pride of strength And the vainglory of superior skill Were interfused with objects which subdued And tempered them, and gradually produced A quiet independence of heart. And to my friend who knows me I may add, Unapprehensive of reproof, that…

    • Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Book 1: “Invigorating thoughts from former years”

      Excerpts from Book 1 of Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude. Other excerpts are here.   Time, place, and manners, these I seek, and these I find in plenteous store, but nowhere such As may be singled out with steady choice – No little band of yet remembered names Whom I, in perfect confidence, might hope To summon…

    • Risking the Sacred – an essay by Tim Miller

      Originally posted on Amethyst Review: RISKING THE SACRED Many years ago now, while living in California, I was sitting in a mostly-empty university library, surprised to find a literary manifesto in a fairly prominent US magazine. Seeing almost immediately that it was just a lot of posturing and attitude, I gave up. Turning, I saw…

    • Ted Hughes: 2 War Poems

      Six Young Men The celluloid of a photograph holds them well – Six young men, familiar to their friends. Four decades that have faded and ochre-tinged This photograph have not wrinkled the faces or the hands. Though their cocked hats are not now fashionable, Their shoes shine. One imparts an intimate smile, One chews a…

    • The Great Myths #35: A Child During the Trojan War (Greek)

      One of the great characters in Greek myth who never actually speaks is Astyanax, the son of Hector and the grandson of the king and queen of Troy. Below are two stories: he first appears in the Iliad as an infant, terrified when he sees his father in full armor, in one of the great…

    • The Great Myths #34: A Hausa and Swahili Story of Childhood (African)

      As usual with such stories, childhood is synonymous with the dangers of being children: The Swahili version of a very popular story runs as follows: Some girls had gone down to the beach to gather shells. One of them picked up a specially fine cowry, which she was afraid of losing, and so laid it…

    • The Great Myths #33: The Child Cúchulainn Gets His Name (Celtic)

      When Culand the smith offered Conchubur his hospitality, he said that a large host should not come, for the feast would be the fruit not of lands and possessions but of his tongs and his two hands. Conchubur went with fifty of his oldest and most illustrious heroes in their chariots. First, however, he visited…

    • “All I know is a door into the dark”: 2 Poems by Seamus Heaney

      A young Seamus Heaney recalls a blacksmith from his boyhood, while a much older Seamus Heaney illustrates the sometimes excessive power of retributive force (he says he was inspired by the U. S. military response to 9/11) by the swinging of a sledgehammer.   The Forge All I know is a door into the dark,Outside,…

    • The Great Myths #32: The Childhood of Jesus (Christian)

      The Infancy Gospel of Thomas 2:1-6: When this boy, Jesus, was five years old, he was playing at the ford of a rushing stream. He was collecting the flowing water into ponds and made the water instantly pure. He did this with a single command. He then made soft clay and shaped it into twelve…

    • Wordsworth’s Sonnets (Forerunners)

    • The Great Myths #31: The Child Krishna & the Universe in His Mouth (Hindu)

      One day when Rāma and the other little sons of the cowherds were playing, they reported to his mother, “Kṛṣṇa has eaten dirt.” Yaśodā took Krishna by the hand and scolded him, for his own good, and she said to him, seeing that his eyes were bewildered with fear, “Naughty boy, why have you secretly…

    • The Great Myths #30: The Holy Grail Appears (Middle High German)

      The story of the Holy Grail’s appearance to a young man named Perceval/Parzival/Parsifal, is told in many places, and goes something like this: he comes by chance upon the Grail Castle, and is introduced to a wounded man, the Fisher King; during a feast that night, the Grail appears, and if only Parzival would ask…

    • The Great Myths #29: Learning Poetry in the Giant’s Stomach (Finnish)

      The poet/shaman Väinämöinen, in need of new poems and spells in order to build a boat, goes through an ordeal within the belly of a giant, the keeper of those stories. Here, the giant/ogre figure is more primordial and wise and not simply uncivilized and destructive: Steady old Väinämöinen when he got not words from…

    • The Great Myths #28: Odysseus Outsmarts the Cyclops

      Odysseus and friends land on the island “of the lawless outrageous Cyclopes,” one-eyed giants who know nothing of planting and harvesting, and who live in caves. They find their way to one of these caves: Lightly we made our way to the cave, but we did not find him there, he was off herding on…

    • The Great Myths #27: The Monster Bear & the Making of Thunder (Miwok)

      From the Miwok tribe of California, who are now “practically extinct”: Bear’s sister-in-law, Deer, had two beautiful fawn daughters. Bear was a horrible, wicked woman, and she wanted the fawns for herself. So this is what she did. One day she invited Deer to accompany her when she went to pick clover. The two fawns…

    • The Great Myths #26: Sigurd Kills the Monster Fafnir & Understands the Language of Animals (Norse)

      What is the reason for gold being called otter-payment? It is said that when the Aesir went to explore the whole world – Odin and Loki and Haenir – they came to a certain river and went along the river to a certain waterfall, and by the waterfall there was an otter and it had…

    • The Great Myths #25: The Monster Kirttimukha & the Face of Glory (Hindu)

      The Indian legend of the “Face of Glory” begins, like that of the Man-Lion, with the case of an infinitely ambitious king who through extraordinary austerities had gained the power to unseat the gods and was now sole sovereign of the universe. His name was Jalandhara, “Water Carrier,” and he conceived the impudent notion of…

    • The Great Myths #24: The Monster Satan (Dante)

      In one of the great gymnastic feats of world literature, Dante and Virgil climb the body of Satan, located as it is in the center of the earth. Travelling upside down and changing hemispheres as they go, they emerge to see the Mountain of Purgatory, which was created by the crash of Lucifer’s body as…

    • The Great Myths #23: The Monster Grendel (Anglo-Saxon)

      Then from the moor     under misty hillsides, Grendel came gliding     girt with God’s anger. The man-scather sought     someone to snatch from the high hall.     He crept under clouds until the caught sight     of the king’s court whose gilded gables     he knew at a glance. He…

    • The Great Myths #22: The Monster Humbaba (Mesopotamian)

      Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu face Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forests of Lebanon. The tablets where the story is found contain many breaks, indicated throughout with an ellipsis; and the translation used here fills in some gaps by integrating other versions of the story. Also, in our day and age, the story can…

    • The Great Myths #20: The Holy Grail Appears (Middle English)

      Then anon they heard cracking and crying of thunder, that them thought the place should all to-drive. In the midst of this blast entered a sunbeam more clearer by seven times than ever they saw day, and all they were alighted of the grace of the Holy Ghost. Then began every knight to behold other,…

    • The Great Myths #19: The Sacrifice of Ymir Made into the World (Norse)

      From a dialogue about the beginning of the world; at one point, a giant called Ymir is mentioned: “Where did Ymir live, and what did he live on?” “The next thing, when the rime dripped, was that there came into being a cow called Audhumla, and four rivers of milk flowed from its teats, and…

    • The Great Myths #18: The Sacrifice of Isaac (Jewish)

      And it happened after these things that God tested Abraham. And He said to him, “Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” And He said, “Take, pray, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt offering on one of…

    • The Great Myths #17: A Sacrifice for the Feast (Greek)

      The cow came in from the field, and the companions of great-hearted Telemachos came from beside their fast black ship, and the smith came, holding in his hands the tools for forging bronze, his handicraft’s symbols, the anvil and the sledgehammer and the well-wrought pincers with which he used to work the gold, and Athene…

    • The Great Myths #16: A Siberian Horse Sacrifice, and the Shaman’s Ascent to the Sky (Altaic)

      The first evening is devoted to preparation for the rite. The kam (shaman), having chosen a spot in a meadow, erects a new yurt there, setting inside it a young birch stripped of its lower branches and with nine steps (tapty) notched into its trunk. The higher foliage of the birch, with a flag at…

    • The Great Myths #15: The Horse Sacrifice (Hindu)

      Rig Veda 1:162 – The Sacrifice of the Horse Mitra, Varuṇa, Aryaman the Active, Indra the ruler of the Ṛbhus, and the Maruts – let them not fail to heed us when we proclaim in the assembly the heroic deeds of the racehorse who was born of the gods. When they lead the firmly grasped…

    • The Great Myths #14: The Sparrow in Northumbria (Christian)

      Around the year 627, when King Edwin of Northumbria and his advisors were discussing the possibility of converting to Christianity, one of them replied this way: Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight…

    • The Great Myths #13: The Two Men Who Became Bulls (Irish)

      One of the many preludes to the great Irish epic, The Táin: What caused the two pig-keepers to quarrel? It is soon told. There was bad blood between Ochall Ochne, the king of the síd in Connacht, and Bodb, king of the Munster síd. (Bodb’s síd is the “Síd ar Femen,” the síd on Femen…

    • The Great Myths #12: The Corn Mother (Penobscot)

      When Kloskurbeh, the All-maker, lived on earth, there were no people yet. But one day when the sun was high, a youth appeared and called him “Uncle, brother of my mother.” This young man was born from the foam of the waves, foam quickened by the wind and warmed by the sun. It was the…

    • The Great Myths #10: The Holy Grail Appears (Old French)

      In the clear light Of the fire, [Perceval] could see, behind him, The page in charge of his weapons And armor, and handed him The sword, to hold with the rest. And then he rejoined his host, Who’d done him so great an honor. They sat in a hall lit As brightly as candles can…

    • The Great Myths #9 Wild With Divinity (Greek)

      In ancient Thebes, the king, Pentheus, has refused to worship the god Dionysus; the god in turn has driven the women of Thebes into an ecstatic religious frenzy, as a messenger describes to the king: Messenger:                                      …

    • The Great Myths #8: This Whole World is Dwelt in by the Lord (Hindu)

      This whole world is to be dwelt in by the Lord, whatever living being there is in the world. So you should eat what has been abandoned; and do not covet anyone’s wealth. Just performing works in this world, you should desire to live your hundred years. Thus, and not otherwise, in fact, does work…

    • The Great Myths #7: The Tree of Souls (Jewish)

      God has a tree of flowering souls in Paradise. The angel who sits beneath it is the Guardian of Paradise, and the tree is surrounded by the four winds of the world. From this tree blossom forth all souls, as it is said, “I am like a cypress tree in bloom; your fruit issues forth…

    • The Great Myths #6: Enkidu in the Underworld (Mesopotamian)

      [Amid the long illness that leads to Enkidu’s death:] As for Enkidu, his mind was troubled, he lay on his own and began to ponder. What was on his mind he told his friend:      “My friend, in the course of the night I had such a dream!” “The heavens thundered, the earth gave…

    • The Great Myths #5: A Ghost Story (Icelandic)

      After Thorolf died, a good many people found it more and more unpleasant to stay out of doors once the sun had begun to go down. As the summer wore on, it became clear that Thorolf wasn’t quiet, for after sunset no one out of doors was left in peace. There was another thing, too:…

    • The Great Myths #4: The Round Dance of the Cross (Christian)

      [Before the crucifixion] Jesus told us to form a circle and hold each other’s hands, and he himself stood in the middle, and said, “Respond to me with ‘Amen.’” The Song So he began by singing a hymn and declaring, “Glory be to you, father.” And we circled around him and responded to him, “Amen.”…

    • The Great Myths #3: A Kakadu Creation (Australian)

      Wuraka came from the west, walking through the sea. His feet were on the bottom but he was so tall that his head was well above the surface of the water. He landed at a place called Allukaladi, between what are now known as Mts. Bidwell and Roe, both of which he made. His first…

    • The Great Myths #2: The Dream of Óengus (Irish)

      Óengus was asleep one night when he saw something like a young girl coming towards the head of his bed, and she was the most beautiful woman in Ériu. He made to take her hand and draw her to his bed, but, as he welcomed her, she vanished suddenly, and he did not know who…

    • The Great Myths #1: The Old Woman & the End of the World (White River Sioux)

      Somewhere at a place where the prairie and the Maka Sicha, the Badlands, meet, there is a hidden cave. Not for a long, long time has anyone been able to find it. Even now, with so many highways, cars, and tourists, no one has discovered this cave.             In it lives a woman so old…

    • Tao Te Ching #81: “True words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not true”

      True words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not true. The good are not argumentative, the argumentative are not good. Knowers do not generalize, generalists do not know. Sages do not accumulate anything but give everything to others, having more the more they give. The Way of heaven helps and does not harm. The Way…

    • Tao Te Ching #80: “the people go back to simple techniques”

      A small state has few people. It has the people keep arms but not use them. It has them regard death gravely and not go on distant campaigns. Even if they have vehicles, they have nowhere to drive them. Even if they have weapons, they have nowhere to use them. It has the people go…

    • Tao Te Ching #79: “Therefore sages keep their faith and do not pressure others”

      When you harmonize bitter enemies, yet resentment is sure to linger, how can this be called good? Therefore sages keep their faith and do not pressure others. So the virtuous see to their promises, while the virtueless look after precedents. The Way of heaven is impersonal it is always with good people. – Thomas Cleary…

    • Tao Te Ching #78: “So the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful”

      Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it. So the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful. Everyone knows this, but no one can do it. This is why…

    • Tao Te Ching #77: “The Way of heaven reduces excess and fills need, but the way of humans is not so”

      The Way of heaven is like drawing a bow: the high is lowered, the low is raised; excess is reduced, need is fulfilled. The Way of heaven reduces excess and fills need, but the way of humans is not so: they strip the needy to serve those who have too much. – Thomas Cleary  …

    • Tao Te Ching #76: “Let strength and might be put below, and tender, gentle in control”

      When people are born they are supple, and when they die they are stiff. When trees are born they are tender, and when they die they are brittle. Stiffness is thus a companion of death, flexibility a companion of life. So when an army is strong, it does not prevail. When a tree is strong,…

    • Tao Te Ching #75: “Only those who do not contrive to live are wise in valuing life”

      When people are starving, it is because their governments take too much, causing them to starve. When people are hard to control, it is because of the contrivances of their governments, which make them hard to control. When people slight death, it is because of the earnestness with which they seek life; that makes them…

    • Tao Te Ching #74: “If people usually don’t fear death, how can death be used to scare them?”

      If people usually don’t fear death, how can death be used to scare them? If people are made to fear death, and you can catch and kill them when they act oddly, who would dare? There are always executioners. And to kill in place of an executioner is taking the place of a master carver.…

    • Tao Te Ching #73: “But which man knows what heaven condemns, what precedents it’s guided by?”

      Boldness in daring means killing; boldness in not daring means life. These two may help and may harm. Who knows the reason for what heaven dislikes? This is why even sages find it hard for them. The Way of heaven win well without contest, responds well without speech, comes of itself uncalled, relaxed yet very…

    • Tao Te Ching #72: “Don’t repress how people live”

      When the people are not awed by authority, then great authority is attained. Their homes are not small to them, their livelihood is not tiresome. Just because they do not tired of it, it is not tiresome to them. Therefore sages know themselves but do not see themselves. They take care of themselves but do…

    • Tao Te Ching #71: “To presume to know what you don’t is sick”

      To know unconsciously is best. To presume to know what you don’t is sick. Only by recognizing the sickness of sickness is it possible not to be sick. To sages’ freedom from ills was from recognizing the sickness of sickness, so they didn’t suffer from sickness. – Thomas Cleary   To understand yet not understand…

    • Tao Te Ching #70: “And so we remain unknown”

      My sayings are very easy to recognize, and very easy to apply. But no one in the world can recognize them, and no one can apply them. Sayings have a source, events have a leader. It is only through ignorance that I am not known. Those who know me are rare; those who emulate me…

    • Tao Te Ching #69: “No fate is worse than to have no enemy”

      There are sayings on the use of arms: “Let us not be aggressors, but defend.” “Let us not advance an inch, but retreat a foot.” This is called carrying out no action, shaking no arm, facing no enemy, wielding no weapon. No calamity is greater than underestimating opponents. If you underestimate opponents, you’re close to…

    • Tao Te Ching #68 “This is the virtue of nonaggression”

      Good warriors do not arm, good fighters don’t get mad, good winners don’t contend, good employers serve their workers. This is called the virtue of noncontention; this is called mating with the supremely natural and pristine. – Thomas Cleary   In ancient times the perfect officer wasn’t armed the perfect warrior wasn’t angry the perfect…

    • Tao Te Ching #67: “What Heaven creates let compassion protect”

      Everyone in the world says my Way is great, but it seems incomparable. It is just because it is great that it seems incomparable: when comparisons are long established it becomes trivialized. I have three treasures that I keep and hold: one is mercy, the second is frugality, the third is not presuming to be…

    • Tao Te Ching #66: Because they do not contend, no one in the world can contend with them”

      The reason why rivers and seas can be lords of the hundred valleys is that they lower themselves to them well; therefore they can be lords of the hundred valleys. So when sages wishes to rise above people, they lower themselves to them in their speech. When they want to precede people, they go after…

    • Tao Te Ching #65: “The ancient masters of the Way tried not to enlighten but to keep people in the dark”

      In ancient times, good practitioners of the Way did not use it to enlighten the people, but to make them unsophisticated. When people are unruly, it is because of sophistication. So to govern a country by cunning is to rob the country. Not using cunning to govern a country is good fortune for the country.…

    • Tao Te Ching #64: “The most massive tree grows from a sprout, the highest building rises from a pile of earth, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a step”

      What is at rest is easy to hold. What has not shown up is easy to take into account. What is frail is easy to break. What is vague is easy to dispel. Do it before it exists; govern it before there’s disorder. The most massive tree grows from a sprout; the highest building rises…

    • Tao Te Ching #63: “Do nondoing, strive for nonstriving, savor the flavorless, regard the small as important, make much of little, repay enmity with virtue”

      Do nondoing, strive for nonstriving, savor the flavorless, regard the small as important, make much of little, repay enmity with virtue; plan for difficulty when it is still easy, do the great while it is still small. The most difficult things in the world must be done while they are easy; the greatest things in…

    • Tao Te Ching #62: “advancing calmly on this Way”

      The Way is the pivot of all things: the treasure of good people, the safeguard of those who are not good. Find words can be sold, honored acts can oppress people; why should people who are not good abandon them? Therefore to establish an emperor and set up high officials, one may have a great…

    • Tao Te Ching #61: “A great nation wants no more than to include and nurture people”

      A great nation flows downward into intercourse with the world. The female of the world always prevails over the male by stillness. Because stillness is considered lower, by lowering itself to a small nation a great nation takes a small nation; by being lower than a great nation a small nation takes a great nation.…

    • Tao Te Ching #60: “Governing a large nation is like cooking little fish”

      Governing a large nation is like cooking little fish. When the world is ruled by the Way, the ghosts are powerless. It is not that the ghosts are powerless; their spirits do not harm the people. Not only do the spirits not harm the people; sages do not harm the people either. Because the two…

    • Tao Te Ching #59: “The Way of extended life and sustained reflection”

      To govern the human and serve the divine, nothing compares to frugality. Only frugality brings early recovery; early recovery means buildup of power. Build up virtue, and you master all. When you master all, no one knows your limit. When no one knows your limit, you can maintain a nation. When you maintain the matrix…

    • Tao Te Ching #58: “happiness rests in misery, misery hides in happiness”

      When the government is unobtrusive, the people are pure. When the government is invasive, the people are wanting. Calamity is what fortune depends upon; fortune is what calamity subdues. Who knows how it will all end? Is there no right and wrong? The orthodox becomes unorthodox, the good also becomes ill; people’s confusion is indeed…

    • Tao Te Ching #57: “the people simplify themselves”

      Use straightforwardness for civil government, use surprise for military operations; use noninvolvement to take the world. How do I know this? The more taboos there are in the world, the poorer the populace is; the more crafts the people have, the more exotic things are produced; the more laws are promulgated, the greater the number…

    • Tao Te Ching #56: “Those who know do not say, those who say do not know”

      Those who know do not say; those who say do not know. Close the senses, shut the doors; blunt the sharpness, resolve the complications; harmonize the light, assimilate to the world. This is called mysterious sameness. It cannot be made familiar, yet cannot be estranged; it cannot be profited, yet cannot be harmed; it cannot…

    • Tao Te Ching #55: “Knowing how to be balanced we endure, knowing how to endure we become wise”

      The richness of subliminal virtue is comparable to an infant: poisonous creatures do not sting it, wild beasts do not claw it, predatory birds do not grab it. Its tendons are flexible, yet its grip is firm. Even while it knows not the mating of male and female, its genitals get aroused; this is the…

    • Tao Te Ching #54: “What you plant well can’t be uprooted, what you hold well can’t be taken away”

      Good construction does not fall down, a good embrace does not let go; their heirs honor them unceasingly. Cultivate it in yourself, and that virtue is real; cultivate it in the home, and that virtue is abundant; cultivate it in the locality, and that virtue lasts; cultivate it in the nation, and that virtue is…

    • Tao Te Ching #53: “The Great Way is quite even, yet people prefer byways”

      Causing one flashes of knowledge to travel the Great Way, only its application demands care. The Great Way is quite even, yet people prefer byways. When courts are extremely fastidious, the fields are seriously neglected, and the granaries are very empty; they wear colorful clothing and carry sharp swords, eat and drink to their fill…

    • Tao Te Ching #52: “Once you’ve found the mother, thereby you know the child”

      The world has a beginning that is the mother of the world. Once you’ve found the mother, thereby you know the child. Once you know the child, you return to keep the mother, not perishing though the body die. Close your eyes, shut your doors, and you do not toil all your life. Open your…

    • Tao Te Ching #51: “this is called Dark Virtue”

      The Way gives birth, virtue nurtures, things form, momentum completes. Therefore all beings honor the Way and value its Virtue. The honor of the Way and the value of Virtue are not granted by anyone, but are always naturally so. So the Way gives birth and nurtures, makes grow and develops, completes and matures, builds…

    • Tao Te Ching #50: “for them there’s no land of death”

      Exiting life, we enter death. The followers of life are three out of ten; in the lives of the people, the dying grounds on which they are agitated are also three out of ten. What is the reason? Because of the seriousness with which they take life as life. It has been said that those…

    • Tao Te Ching #49: “Sages have no fixed mind, they make the minds of the people their mind”

      Sages have no fixed mind; they make the minds of the people their mind: they improve the good, and also improve those who are not good; that virtue is good. They make sure of the true, and they make sure of the untrue too; that virtue is sure. The relation of sages to the world…

    • Tao Te Ching #48: “To pursue learning, learn more day by day, to pursue the Way, unlearn it day by day”

      For learning you gain daily; for the Way you lose daily. Losing and losing, thus you reach noncontrivance; be uncontrived, and nothing is not done. Taking the world is always done by not making anything out of it. For when something is made of it, that is not enough to take the world. – Thomas…

    • Tao Te Ching #47: “Without going out your door you can know the whole world”

      They know the world without even going out the door. They see the sky and its pattern without even looking out the window. The further out it goes, the less knowledge it; therefore sages know without going, name without seeing, complete without striving. – Thomas Cleary   Without going out your door you can know…

    • Tao Te Ching #46: “No crime is greater than approving of greed”

      When the world has the Way, running horses are retired to till the fields. When the world lacks the Way, war-horses are bred in the countryside. No crime is greater than approving of greed; no calamity is greater than discontent, no fault is greater than possessiveness. So the satisfaction of contentment is always enough. –…

    • Tao Te Ching #45: “Clear stillness is right for the world”

      Great completeness seems incomplete; its use is never exhausted. Great fullness seems empty; its use is never ended. Great directness seems restrained, great skill seems inept, great eloquence seems inarticulate. Movement overcomes cold, stillness overcomes heat. Clear stillness is right for the world. – Thomas Cleary   Perfectly complete it seems deficient yet it never…

    • Tao Te Ching #44: “Extreme fondness means great expense, and abundant possessions mean much loss”

      Which is closer, your name or your body? Which is more, your body or your possessions? Which is more destructive, gain or loss? Extreme fondness means great expense, and abundant possessions mean much loss. If you know when you have enough, you will not be disgraced. If you know when to stop, you will not…

    • Tao Te Ching #43: “In this world below the sky the gentle will outdo the strong”

      What is softest in the world drives what is hardest in the world. Nonbeing enters where there is no room; that is how we know noncontrivance enhances. Unspoken guidance and uncontrived enhancement are reached by few in the world. – Thomas Cleary   The weakest thing in the world overcomes the strongest thing in the…

    • Tao Te Ching #42: “Those who take less shall have more, Those given more shall have less”

      The Way produces one; one produces two, two produces three, three produces all beings: all beings bear yin and embrace yang, with a mellowing energy for harmony. The things people dislike are only to be alone, lacking, and unworthy; yet these are what monarchs call themselves. Therefore people may gain from loss, and may lose…

    • Tao Te Ching #41: “If they didn’t laugh at it, it wouldn’t be the Way”

      When superior people hear of the Way, they carry it out with diligence. When middling people hear of the Way, it sometimes seems to be there, sometimes not. When lesser people hear of the Way, they ridicule it greatly. If they didn’t laugh at it, it wouldn’t be the Way. So there are constructive sayings…

    • Tao Te Ching #40: “The Tao moves the other way, the Tao works through weakness”

      Return is the movement of the Way; yielding is the function of the Way. All things in the world are born of being; being is born of nonbeing. – Thomas Cleary   The Tao moves the other way, the Tao works through weakness the things of this world come from something something comes from nothing…

    • Tao Te Ching #39: “Attaining unity”

      When unity was attained of old, heaven became clear by attaining unity, earth became steady by attaining unity, spirit was quickened by attaining unity, valley streams quickened by attaining unity, all beings were born filled by attaining unity; and by attaining unity lords acted rightly for the sake of the world. What brought this about…

    • Tao Te Ching #38: “Virtue comes after loss of the Way”

      Higher virtue is not ingratiating; that is why it has virtue. Lower virtue does not forget about reward; that is why is it virtueless. Higher virtue is uncontrived, and there is no way to contrive it. Lower virtue is created, and there is a way to do it. Higher humanity is created, but there is…

    • Tao Te Ching #37: “By not wanting, there is calm, and the world will straighten itself”

      The Way is always uncontrived, yet there’s nothing it doesn’t do. If lords and monarchs could keep to it, all being would evolve spontaneously. When they have evolved and want to act, I would stabilize them with nameless simplicity. Even nameless simplicity would not be wanted. By not wanting, there is calm, and the world…

    • Tao Te Ching #36: “Flexibility and yielding overcome adamant coerciveness”

      Should you want to contain something, you must deliberately let it expand. Should you want to weaken something, you must deliberately let it grow strong. Should you want to eliminate something, you must deliberately allow it to flourish. Should you want to take something away, you must deliberately grant it. This is called subtle illumination.…

    • Tao Te Ching #35: “the Tao speaks plain words that make no sense … yet we use it without end”

      When holding the Great Image, the world goes on and on without harm, peaceful, even tranquil. Where there is music and dining, passing travelers stop; but the issue of the Way is so plain as to be flavorless. When you look at it, it is invisible; when you listen to it, it is inaudible; when…

    • Tao Te Ching #34: “Therefore sages never contrive greatness; that is why they can become so great.”

      The Great Way is universal; it can apply to the left or the right. All beings depend on it for life, and it does not refuse. Its accomplishments fulfilled, it does not dwell on them. It lovingly nurtures all beings, but does not act as their ruler. As it has no desire, it can be…

    • Tao Te Ching #33: “Those who know others are wise; those who know themselves are enlightened.”

      Those who know others are wise; those who know themselves are enlightened. Those who overcome others are powerful; those who overcome themselves are strong. Those who are contented are rich; those who act strongly have will. Those who do not lose their place endure; those who die without perishing live long. – Thomas Cleary  …

    • Tao Te Ching #32: “The Way is essentially nameless”

      The Way is essentially nameless. Though simplicity is small, the world cannot subordinate it. If lords and monarchs can keep to it, all beings will naturally resort to them. Heaven and earth combine, thus showering sweet dew. No humans command it; it is even by nature. Start fashioning, and there are names; once names also…

    • Tao Te Ching #31: “Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them”

      Fine weapons are implements of ill omen: people may despise them, so those with the Way do not dwell with them. Therefore the place of honor for the cultured is on the left, while the honored place for the martialist is on the right. Weapons, being instruments of ill omen, are not the tools of…

    • Tao Te Ching #30: “do not coerce the world with weapons”

      Those who assist human leadership with the Way do not coerce the world with weapons, for these things are apt to backfire. Brambles grow where an army has been; there are always bad years after a war. Therefore the good are effective, that is all; they do not presume to grab power thereby: they are…

    • Tao Te Ching #29: “Should you want to take this world”

      Should you want to take this world, and contrive to do so, I see you won’t manage to finish. The most sublime instrument in the world cannot be contrived. Those who contrive spoil it; those who cling lose it. So creatures sometimes go and sometimes follow, sometimes puff and sometimes blow, are sometimes strong and…

    • Tao Te Ching #28: “Know the male, keep the female”

      Know the male, keep the female; be humble toward the world. But humble to the world, and eternal power never leaves, returning again to innocence. Knowing the white, keep the black; be an exemplar for the world. Be an exemplar for the world, and eternal power never goes awry, returning again to infinity. Knowing the…

    • Tao Te Ching #27: “Good works are trackless”

      “Good works are trackless” Good works are trackless, good words are flawless, good planning isn’t calculating. What is well closed has no bolt locking it, but cannot be opened. What is well bound has no rope confining it, but cannot be untied. Therefore sages always consider it good to save people, so that there are…

    • Tao Te Ching #26: “Gravity is the root of lightness”

      Gravity is the root of lightness; calm is the master of excitement. Thereby do exemplary people travel all day without leaving their equipment. Though they have a look of prosperity, their resting place is transcendent. What can be done about heads of state who take the world lightly in their own self-interest? Lack of gravity…

    • Tao Te Ching #25: “Something undifferentiated was born before heaven and earth”

      Something undifferentiated was born before heaven and earth; still and silent, standing alone and unchanging, going through cycles unending, able to be mother to the world. I do not know its name; I label it the Way. Imposing on it a great name, I call it Great. Greatness means it goes; going means reaching afar;…

    • Tao Te Ching #24: “Those on tiptoe don’t stand up”

      Those on tiptoe don’t stand up, those who take long strides don’t walk; those who see themselves are not perceptive, those who assert themselves are not illustrious; those who glorify themselves have no merit, those who are proud of themselves do not last. On the Way, these are called overconsumption and excess activity. Some people…

    • Tao Te Ching #23: “To speak rarely is natural”

      To speak rarely is natural. That is why a gusty wind doesn’t last the morning, a downpour of rain doesn’t last the day. Who does this? Heaven and earth. If even heaven and earth cannot go on forever, how much less can human beings! Therefore those who follow the Way assimilate to the Way; the…

    • Tao Te Ching #22: “Be tactful and you remain whole”

      Be tactful and you remain whole; bend and you remain straight. The hollow is filled, the old is renewed. Economy is gain, excess is confusion. Therefore sages embrace unity as a model for the world. Not seeing themselves, they are therefore clear. Not asserting themselves, they are therefore meritorious. Not taking pride in themselves, they…

    • Tao Te Ching #21: “For the countenance of great virtue”

      For the countenance of great virtue, only the Way is to be followed. As a thing, the Way is abstract and elusive: elusive and abstract, there are images in it; abstract and elusive, there is something there. Recondite, hidden, it has vitality therein: that vitality is very real; it has truth therein. From ancient times…

    • Tao Te Ching #20: “Detach from learning and you have no worries”

      Detach from learning and you have no worries. How far apart are yes and yeah? How far apart are good and bad? The things people fear cannot but be feared. Wild indeed the uncentered! Most people celebrate as if they were barbequing a slaughtered cow, or taking in the springtime vistas; I alone am aloof,…

    • Tao Te Ching #19: “Eliminate sagacity, abandon knowledge”

      Eliminate sagacity, abandon knowledge, and the people benefit a hundredfold. Eliminate humanitarianism, abandon duty, and the people return to familial love. Eliminate craft, abandon profit, and theft will no longer exist. These three become insufficient when used for embellishment causing there to be attachments. See the basic, embrace the unspoiled, lessen selfishness, diminish desire. –…

    • Tao Te Ching #18: “When the Great Way is deserted”

      When the Great Way is deserted, then there is humanitarian duty. When intelligence comes forth, there is great fabrication. When relations are discordant, then there is family love. When the national polity is benighted and confused, then there are loyal ministers. – Thomas Cleary   When the Great Way disappears we meet kindness and justice…

    • Tao Te Ching #17: “Very great leaders in their domains”

      Very great leaders in their domains are only known to exist. Those next best are beloved and praised. The lesser are feared and despised. Therefore when faith is insufficient and there is disbelief, it is from the high value placed on words. Works are accomplished, tasks are completed, and ordinary folk all say they are…

    • Tao Te Ching #16: “Attain the climax of emptiness”

      Attain the climax of emptiness, preserve the utmost quiet: as myriad things act in concert, I thereby observe the return. Things flourish, then each returns to its root. Returning to the root is called stillness: stillness is called return to Life, return to Life is called the constant; knowing the constant is called enlightenment. Acts…

    • Tao Te Ching #15: “Skilled warriors of old were subtle”

      Skilled warriors of old were subtle, mysteriously powerful, so deep they were unknowable. Just because they are unknowable, I will try to describe them. Their wariness was as that of one crossing a river in winter, their caution was as that of one in fear of all around; their gravity was as that of a…

    • Tao Te Ching #14: “What you don’t see when you look”

      What you don’t see when you look is called the unobtrusive. What you don’t hear when you listen is called the rarefied. What you don’t get when you grasp is called the subtle. These three cannot be completely fathomed, so they merge into one; above is not bright, below is not dark. Continuous, unnamable, it…

    • Tao Te Ching #13: “Favor and disgrace seem alarming”

      Favor and disgrace seem alarming; high status greatly afflicts your person. What are favor and disgrace? Favor is the lower: get it and you’re surprised, lose it and you’re startled. This means favor and disgrace are alarming. Why does high status greatly affect your person? The reason we have a lot of trouble is that…

    • Tao Te Ching #12: “Colors blind people’s eyes”

      Colors blind people’s eyes, sounds deafen their ears; flavors spoil people’s palates, the chase and the hunt craze people’s minds; goods hard to obtain make people’s actions harmful. Therefore sages work for the middle and not the eyes, leaving the latter and taking the former. – Thomas Cleary   The five colors make our eyes…

    • Tao Te Ching #11: “Thirty spokes join at the hub”

      Thirty spokes join at the hub: their use for the cart is where they are not. When the potter’s wheel makes a pot, the use of the pot is precisely where there is nothing. When you open doors and windows for a room, it is where there is nothing that they are useful to the…

    • Tao Te Ching #10: “Carrying vitality and consciousness”

      Carrying vitality and consciousness, embracing them as one, can you keep them from parting? Concentrating energy, making it supple, can you be like an infant? Purifying hidden perception, can you make it flawless? Loving the people, governing the nation, can you be uncontrived? As the gate of heaven opens and closes, can you be impassive?…

    • Tao Te Ching #9: “To keep on filling is not as good as stopping”

      To keep on filling is not as good as stopping. Calculated sharpness cannot be kept for long. Though gold and jewels fill their houses, no one can keep them. When the rich upper classes are haughty, their legacy indicts them. When one’s work is accomplished honorably, to retire is the Way of heaven. – Thomas…

    • Tao Te Ching #8: “Higher good is like water”

      Higher good is like water: the good in water benefits all, and does so without contention. It rests where people dislike to be, so it is close to the Way. Where it dwells becomes good ground; profound is the good in its heart, benevolent the good it bestows. Goodness in words is trustworthiness, goodness in…

    • Tao Te Ching #7: “Heaven is eternal, earth is everlasting”

      Heaven is eternal, earth is everlasting. The reason they can be eternal and everlasting is that they do not foster themselves; that is why they can live forever. For this reason sages put themselves last, and they were first; they excluded themselves, and they survived. Was it not by their very selflessness that they managed…

    • Tao Te Ching #6: “The valley spirit not dying”

      The valley spirit not dying is called the mysterious female. The opening of the mysterious female is called the root of heaven and earth. Continuous, on the brink of existence, to put it into practice, don’t try to force it. – Thomas Cleary   The valley spirit that doesn’t die we call the dark womb…

    • Tao Te Ching #5: “Heaven and earth are not humane”

      Heaven and earth are not humane; they regard all beings as straw dogs. Sages are not humane; they see all people as straw dogs. The space between have and earth is like bellows and pipes, empty yet inexhaustible, producing more with movement. The talkative reach their wits’ end again and again; that is not as…

    • Tao Te Ching #4: “The Way is unimpeded harmony”

      The Way is unimpeded harmony; its potential may never be fully exploited. It is as deep as the source of all things: it blunts the edges, resolves the complications, harmonizes the light, assimilates the world. Profoundly still, it seems to be there: I don’t know whose child it is, before the creation of images. –…

    • Tao Te Ching #3: “Not exalting cleverness”

      Not exalting cleverness causes the people not to contend. Not putting high prices on hard-to-get goods causes the people not to steal. Not seeing anything to want causes the mind to be confused. Therefore the government of sages empties the mind and fills the middle, weakens the ambition and strengthens the bones, always keeping the…

    • Tao Te Ching #2: “When everyone knows beauty is beauty”

      When everyone knows beauty is beauty, this is bad. When everyone knows good is good, this is not good. So being and nonbeing produce each other: difficulty and ease complement each other, long and short shape each other, high and low contrast with each other, voice and echoes conform to each other, before and after…

    • Tao Te Ching #1: “A way can be a guide, but not a fixed path”

      A way can be a guide, but not a fixed path; names can be given, but not permanent labels. Nonbeing is called the beginning of heaven and earth; being is called the mother of all things. Always passionless, thereby observe the subtle; ever intent, thereby observe the apparent. These two come from the same source…

    • Don’t Be Such a Boar

      After receiving an email from a reader interested in the mythology surrounding bears, I remembered my own obsession with the boar. This was written some time ago, and one day will hopefully be expanded for a small illustrated book. Forgive the in-line citations, which may be an eyesore, but it would take too long to…

    • Heaney’s Bog Poems (Forerunners)

    • Classic Jam Hits

      Going through my computer the other day, I found the .pdfs of these classic book sets, and thought to post them here for whoever wants them: Frazer’s The Golden Bough, The Mythology of All Races, and Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. [An update in 2021, I’ve now added a translation of…

    • Kafka’s Diaries

        My recent post about Thomas Wolfe elicited a handful of comments like, “I loved to read him when I was young, but as I get older he no longer holds up.” My own versions of Wolfe are people like Hesse and Dostoevsky, but Kafka has remained one of those authors I latched onto in high…

    • Uma Instructs the Gods (Kena Upanishad)

      And here’s one of my favorite bits from the Hindu Upanishads, chapters three and four from the Kena Upanishad. From the translation of Swami Nikhilananda: Brahman, according to the story, obtained a victory for the gods; and by that victory of Brahman the gods became elated. They said to themselves: “Verily, this victory is ours;…

    • Young Krishna & the Universe in His Mouth

      One of my favorite stories from Hinduism comes from the Bhagavata Purana, on the childhood of Krishna: ….One day when Rama and the other little sons of the cowherds were playing, they reported to his mother, “Krishna has eaten dirt.” Yasoda took Krishna by the hand and scolded him, for his own good, and she…

    • The State of Poetry … in 1993

      The following essay was published in the New Criterion in February, 1993, and reflects a view of American poetry from at least the 1970s forward. It’s quite depressing to read this two decades later, since the status of poetry as a subculture can’t help but be worse than it was then, and worse in part…

    • Voluspa

      To close out a month of posts, here’s the Voluspa, that great bit of the world turning over, from the Norse Poetic Edda. Somehow these bards, in the voice of the Seeress narrating it all, were able to cram into a few pages everything from creation to the apocalypse, and there is simply nothing like…

    • Rig Veda

      In another life (appropriately enough), I would have been Hindu; in an additional other life, at the very least I would have started studying Indo-European at a young age. As it happened, whatever brief time I’ve been able to devote to Hinduism has no doubt been saturated with the romanticism of a novice who is…

    • Heaney’s Bog Poems

      Here’s Seamus Heaney, first talking about his poems on the bog bodies of Iron Age Europe, in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Stepping Stones, and then the bog poems themselves, spanning three of his collections: Wintering Out, North, and District and Circle. Also, since I hope to do a post on the bog bodies at some point, interested…

    • T. S. Eliot on Dante

      Is there anything better than T. S. Eliot talking about his debt to Dante? Here is the majority of his famous essay “What Dante Means to Me” (hence my own “What Eliot Means to Me”), which can be found in his collection of essays, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings. The essay was originally…

    • Wallace Stevens, Intergalactic Planetary

      Here are some bits on writing, nature, and anonymous everyday life from Wallace Stevens, that quiet murmur of American poetry who may well outlast nearly everybody. The following are from his letters and journals, from 1898 to 1955, only a few months before his death at seventy-five. That a poet so technically isolated (and gladly…

    • Yeats & Lady Gregory

      (photo from the LG/WBY Heritage Trail) In the single-volume Autobiographies of W. B. Yeats, which collects all of Yeats’s autobiographical writings from throughout his life, the great Irish poet mentions the memoirs of one John O’Leary. O’Leary was apparently taking his good old time at it, writing “passages for his memoirs upon postcards and odd…

    • Jean Guéhenno (Favorite Passages)

      Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, by Jean Guéhenno Guéhenno bio A selection from one of the best documents of occupation during wartime, and one of my favorite diaries of a writer: [Guéhenno, on how he was a pacifist after WWI, but not after WWII started] I…

    • Albert Camus, Notebooks (Favorite Passages)

      Albert Camus: Notebooks, 1935 – 1951 Volume 1: 1935-1942 What I mean is this: that one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgic for lost poverty. A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility. 3 It is in this life of poverty, among these vain or humble people, that…

    • Zen (Favorite Passages)

      Along with my excerpts from Ramakrishna and the Desert Fathers, the following favorites from Zen Buddhism constitute just about all the religious wisdom I need. In one way or another, they are all expressions of humility and empathy, and upend the usual fundamentalist (and simple-minded, arrogant, and certain) approaches to scripture, discipline, knowledge, and to diversity of practice…

    • The Desert Fathers (Favorite Passages)

        Alongside the sayings of Ramakrishna and the monks of Zen Buddhism, the sayings of the Christian Desert Fathers are about all the wisdom I need, and below are my favorites from four separate collections. It will not appeal to everyone, but what these hermits seem to speak of more often than not is that…

    • Hieronymus Bosch

      Entries in the Anthology series organize my favorite anecdotes about artists, writers, and historical events, and are always being updated. While I love and depend on the exhaustive biography or study, in many ways the disconnected stories and fragments have been more important in my day-to-day living with art, literature and history. As such, nothing…

    • Albrecht Dürer

      Entries in the Anthology series organize my favorite anecdotes about artists, writers, and historical events, and are always being updated. While I love and depend on the exhaustive biography or study, in many ways the disconnected stories and fragments have been more important in my day-to-day living with art, literature and history. As such, nothing…

    • Edward Hopper

      Entries in the Anthology series organize my favorite anecdotes about artists, writers, and historical events, and are always being updated. While I love and depend on the exhaustive biography or study, in many ways the disconnected stories and fragments have been more important in my day-to-day living with art, literature and history. As such, nothing…

    • The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Favorite Passages)

      The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, written by “M”, translated by Swami Nikhilananda. It is hard to overstate my love for this book. Along with being the first gift my wife gave me soon after we met, it also contains everything I adore about religion, and articulates all that I ever hope to express about the…

    • Cyril Edwards (Interview)

      I’ve relied on many translators and scholars in the writing of To the House of the Sun, and over the years I’ve been lucky enough to correspond with a few of them. Their specialties vary widely—Greek religion, Hinduism/Indo-European studies, Egyptology, Arthurian romance, etc.—and it seems that their enthusiasm and love for language, history, and religion…

    • What Eliot Means to Me

      (for Eliot’s essay “What Dante Means to Me,” go here) I.Late in life, T. S. Eliot hoped the essays of his that would last would be those “appreciations of individual authors,” saying he had written best “about writers who have influenced my own poetry.”[1]He had come a long way from the essays written in his…

    • Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, by Erik Hornung (Favorite Passages)

      Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, by Erik Hornung [p. 8:] There is no end to the question of the gods and their meaning. [p. 11:] …one cannot deny that the problem of the gods tends toward the infinite and has no final solution…. Anyone who takes history seriously will not…

    • Origins of the Kabbalah, by Gershom Scholem (Favorite Passages)

      Origins of the Kabbalah, by Gershom Scholem [p. 159-60, an excerpt from section 105 of the Bahir, commenting on the Sabbath:] [Every day] has a logos, who is its ruler, not because it was created with it, but because it accomplishes with it the effect that is within its power. When all have accomplished their effect and finished…

    • Silence in London

      Just back from London, where the hugeness of space and history were hard to ignore. But the experience was always deepest in the smallest space, where something sacred, or just something simply old, could be apprehended intimately, in silence. So that it was not Westminster Abbey, despite its beauty as a space and the unnerving realization…