David Matthews Portable Bohemia

At something of a loss after finishing Lakota America by Oxford University historian Pekka Hämäläinen, I plucked Richard Holmes'...

I think of a line from William Wordsworth's poem "Resolution and Independence" as I sit at my desk searching for a way to wrap up this...

The fall term's deep dive into Allen Ginsberg was prompted by an email from Elaine Falone telling me she had an urge to read some...

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) introduced Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) to the audience at the May 7, 1968, edition of Firing Line as...

Readers of On the Approach of My Seventieth Birthday may find these notes for the Little 5 Points section of the poem of interest. Dead...

On the approach of my seventieth birthday tropes of twilight and day's melancholy fade pass into the lyricism of softening light at...

Maybe it is time again to take up the pen in the night's dark hours as I once did, a young fellow home from the night shift at Tall Tales...

I knew next to nothing about Mary McCarthy (1912–1989), the name only, as author of The Groves of Academe and The Group, novels I had not...

The president and the congressional Democratic brain trust may yet pull from their nether regions something to pass in tandem with the...

These days when I confront the wild blank page or the keyboard and the void of the white screen as I set off in search of the poem, I...

I first read Jack Kerouac in 1970. I was eighteen. For the next ten years or so I was heavily into Kerouac and the Beats, reading and...

We were taught to make outlines in high school, maybe before that, as far back as fifth or sixth grade at Dutch Fork Elementary. Although...

W.S. Merwin wrote in a poem that he once asked John Berryman how you can ever be sure that what you write is really any good, to which...

It is just barely possible that we are not the first to live in a turbulent age. Alexander Herzen was born in Moscow a few months before...

I knew of Mary McCarthy and her novels The Group and The Groves of Academe but had not read her until I was intrigued by her depiction in...

A friend from the poetry scene who is now a comic book writer asked what I find rewarding but different in various sorts of writing I...

The Pope project kicked off in earnest with Maynard Mack's formidable biography and a selection of poems that included An Essay on...

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves. —Harold Bloom The English poetry tradition, what is now in...

When the intellectuals became celebrities and women swooned. On October 29, 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre gave a lecture at Club Maintenant in...

Paris in the 1940s. Occupation. Resistance. Liberation, existentialism, jazz. Cafés and hotel rooms were hotbeds of intellectual,...