Konstantin Leontyev and Byzantism. Henry Lawson, Past Carin’. Hart Crane. Tomas Tranströmer. Supply chain fragility. Alexander I and the defeat of Napoleon in 1812. Every poet is an émigré. Nobel Peace Prize misses the point.
Wallace Stevens. COVID zero fanatics. The Novel is dead. Saint Galgano. Louise Glück. How democracies die. Solzhenitsyn.
Michael Oakeshott, Marina Tsvetaeva, Elena Shvarts, Russian Ark, St Petersburg
I am reposting this post from maybe May or June. In Melbourne now all the weeks…
I have begun a YouTube channel, The Burning Archive, where I will feature short videos of…
I am very pleased to announced that I am publishing my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of…
This morning I read this poem. “A task” by Czelaw Milosz, chosen randomly from his collected …
Wallace Stevens is a poet of comedy, and comedy relieves the distress of tragic history. Comedy reconciles the restless, Romantic imagination with the present and the real. When the world falls apart, one must cultivate one’s garden, but also tell some comic stories over dinner. It is comedy, not alone but inseparable, that moves the infinite conversation on.
Over the last difficult year my garden has been a constant companion and a source of…
This morning I read some poems from Hafez (c 1315-1390) that celebrated love and wine and…