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At Seventy: A Last Day Journal [by Jeffrey Levine]
How much of what we tell ourselves, let alone what we write, is collaged from bits and pieces of so-called real life? Richard Hugo says, In a poem you make something up, say for…
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Squib 307: Notes on Willie Mays at the End, Followed by a Hypothetical [by Alan Ziegler]
I’ve never liked when sportswriters disdain great athletes playing past their prime, arrogantly asserting they should have quit before the sad decline. Willie Mays was well past his prime at 40 when my father…
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Is a market top on tap? “Noodles” weighs in [by David Lehman]
Everyone knows that stocks these days, especially US stocks, are overvalued. But picking a market top is no easy matter. David Aronson, former professor at Baruch College, now president of a research firm that…
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Adelia Prado: Heaven, Gothic and on Fire [by Jeffrey Levine]
If it begins in the quotidian, it ends in a place as peculiar and mystical as any Emily Dickinson, where, much like the dead, the speaker of the poem has its own business to…
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Squibs 299—306 [by Alan Ziegler]
299: The entrance requirement for The School of Hard Knocks is a degree from the Institute of Push Comes to Shove. 300: After listening to a bunch of Beach Boys songs, I wonder what their…
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It bloomed and Dropt – Emily Dickinson and the Unsayable [by Jeffrey Levine]
As promised yesterday, I’ve been thinking about this Emily Dickinson poem, about how it handles the unsayable, implies the unsaid: Emily Dickinson – 978 (1864) It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon-The Flower-distinct and…