A poet in a crowd of poets, I first met Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1980. Too short a time after that Tom T. Hall, an old friend, asked Jim Whitehead and me if we would meet him …
Essay
It’s Making You Happy
Yesterday I stood in line with two books, waiting for a poet I love to sign them. While I waited, the photographer who had been roving the event paused about five feet away and began taking my picture. Confused, I …
Scholarship Beyond “Words, Words, Words”: Shakespeare’s Material World
In September 2015, I found myself confronted with the dead body of a rabbit. Its guts had been removed, but the rest of its preparation was up to me. Despite decades of pescatarianism, I gingerly wielded the cleaver, separating the …
The Cartographer’s Assistant
I’ve never had a sense of direction. Each new place appears like an island. There’s a seahorse of memory and navigation tucked in the brain’s bed. But, for me, north is straight up in the sky and a cold climate. …
Why Do We Imagine A Future Without Bookshelves?
There are rumors that the printed book is an endangered species.
This kind of book, we’re told, is outdated. Archaic. The quaint stuff of collectors and historians. Practically obsolete. To hear technocrats explain the story of the printed volume, we …
Failures of Imagination
1.
On a day in late November, my wife and I brought a baby home from the hospital to live with us in our apartment at the corner of Main and Perrin Streets in Lafayette, Indiana. That this baby was …
The Looking Glass
There I am. Of course, I am not really there, but yeah, am I there! I look at myself and I assess myself and I think to myself—well, am I there. I am aware of myself posing, my mouth closed, …
Sacred Geography: Dispatches from India
Ganges Dawn
Predawn, everyone’s awake, Kashi’s jumping.
Excluding the homeless thousands who are unawake.
I’m walking cautiously to the ghats in the semi-dark through littered streets, trying to distinguish trash from cardboard and newspaper humps of low-castes sleeping, groaning while …
Explosions
The biggest explosion I’ve ever seen was a goat’s head when I used to work on a farm.
That doesn’t make sense.
Sorry, I need to relax into this piece and keep it nonfiction.
I once lit a bottle rocket …
Guns
Dedicated to Sigolène Vinson
I once did a class about violence and hyper-masculinity at Auburn University. I’d emailed the administration about what would happen if a school shooting happened. They never got back to me. About a month later there …
