The title comes from a line in Emerson’s essay “Experience,” about the death of his son: “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.” I thought of it often the year my father died—a year which brought more than a few sleepless nights, a year in which I spent many days hiking alone in California’s Santa Cruz mountains, where almost every trailhead sign includes a warning about mountain lions.
Brian Simoneau on "I Grieve That Grief Can Teach Me Nothing" |
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"Books, and Reading, at a Baghdad Book Fair"
"Paperbacks are a distant second to the feel and the scent of the old books that Dr. Joori loves best. But still, she looks forward to the book fair for months. 'Just visiting this place is satisfying even if I don’t buy any books,' she said. Iraqis love books. 'Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads,' goes an old saying."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Susan Tichy on Jane Augustine's Traverse"Spare, unselfconscious, nearly transparent, Augustine’s poems reach out to the things of this world like a ship whose constant soundings describe its own location. No part of her lived experience is excluded, so a reader may find herself meditating on a painting, carrying a backpack, searching for a homeless man under a scaffold, or pulled suddenly back to a parent’s death-night twenty years before." |
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