With the exception of television, no cultural influence in the last forty years has been as powerful and pervasive as popular music. Across a startling range of forms and styles—heavy metal, hip-hop, emo, rhythm and blues, glam, jam, grunge...
I want to consider the configuration of the elegy, particularly the lyric elegy of the American 19th century, for I think it is a creature unto itself. At hand is the problem of Walt Whitman’s great poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard...
For forty years I’d been a socially engaged antiwar poet. I was engaged in the civil rights campaigns of the sixties, supported feminist issues of the seventies, and had, in fact, been a devoted nonviolent revolutionary my entire adult life...
Yet even the “world” itself is imagination, simply “the length of a human life,” as its etymology defines. The 150 years since Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was first published is a moment in any world so conceived, and the bridges to and from...
Whitman is a poet of all the senses, but listening, it seems, engaged him with special force: many of his work’s best-known passages set down what had come to him through the ear. No gesture of style so pronounced can be accidental, and I...
The four authors under review here lead us, through a variety of perspectives, from obscure confusion to plausible conclusions. Appropriately, they tell us that to understand the nature of Putin’s politics, we must understand the nature of...
American coverage of the monstrous hostage-taking at Beslan’s School No. 1 in the Russian republic of North Ossetia and the ensuing controversy over President Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in ostensible response to the terrorist...
I wish I had a cooler story about the first time I saw George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I’d like to say I snuck in to see it at a midnight show in Times Square back in 1978. I’d like to say I saw it in the gloriously appropriate...
At 1:15 a.m. on the morning of February 24, 1981, King Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón saved Spain. In an act of surprising courage and unexpected conviction, the king, dressed in full military regalia, addressed the nation concerning the...
I can tell you that I only trust the ugly writers. Deep down, those are the ones who have earned their wrath. All the rest of them, the pretty boy and girl authors, screw them. Or, better yet, don’t screw them. Get them all hot and bothered...
