PolyArchive

Nothingsville, MN Franz Wright The sole tavern there, empty and filled with cigarette smoke; the smell of beer, urine, and the infinite sadness you dread and need so much of for some reason.

Mosab Abu Toha’s Substack is among the most important documentation I’m reading these days. All eyes on Gaza and the West Bank.   I recently looked into ELVTR, trying to decide whether it was a scam, when I (unwisely) shared my contact info and was repeatedly contacted by a rep whose name I then Googled. […]

Absence Matthew Arnold In this fair stranger’s eyes of grey Thine eyes, my love, I see. I shudder: for the passing day Had borne me far from thee. This is the curse of life: that not A nobler calmer train Of wiser thoughts and feelings blot Our passions from our brain; But each day brings […]

The Peace of Wild Things Wendell Berry When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come […]

Introduction to Wallace Stevens: A Poet of Imagination and Abstraction Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) occupies a revered place in American poetry, celebrated for his intricate use of language and his philosophical exploration of art, imagination, and reality. A master of modernist verse, Stevens seamlessly blended intellectual depth with musicality, crafting poems that challenge and reward readers […]

Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop Thomas Travisano From the Publisher: Description An illuminating new biography of one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop “Love Unknown points movingly to the many relationships that moored Bishop, keeping her together even as life—and her own self-destructive tendencies—threatened to split her […]

Health is Membership Wendell Berry Wendell Berry delivered a speech at the conference “Spirituality and Healing,” at Louisville, Kentucky, on October 17, 1994. Below is an excerpt: So far, I have been implying my beliefs at every turn. Now I had better state them openly. I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John […]

Digging Seamus Heaney Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through […]

…Among those “enemies” prosecuted as a parasite was Joseph Brodsky, a young poet and future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time, he was considered among “the most politically unreliable” people, because he  “was part of a circle of anti-Soviet individuals” and “wrote poems of a decadent and even hostile nature” instead of engaging in activities that […]