-
The Man Living Under the Overpass
My daily bike-ride is not picturesque. It’s along a bike trail that’s squeezed between a highway and a tattered string of small factories and beaten down neighborhoods. The bike trail is usually fairly abandoned when I ride it. Occasionally I’ll pass another biker or someone walking. But I can always count on passing the man who lives under the overpass....
Tags
-
What It's Like to be Alive
In the final scene of Anne Tyler’s novel Back When We Were Grownups, the uncle of protagonist Rebecca gives a speech at the party she has arranged for his 100th birthday. Throughout the novel, he has been an endearingly complex character, quite mentally alert for his age but with spells of irritability or of dissociation from the present. All the novel’s characters, in fact, share this very human mix of....
Tags
-
Everything Around a Central Meaning
The first poem in the current issue of Image (#71) has me mesmerized. And it’s the perfect poem for Lent. “Pantoum for Seven Words,” it’s called—by Amy Newman. I confess that I had to look up the definition of “pantoum.” It’s “a Malay verse form consisting of an indefinite number of quatrains with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the following..."
Tags
-
Bedtime Books
I find it mind-boggling to recall this now, but when I was in my twenties my bedtime reading was Hegel—auf Deutsch! In my thirties, when I had gotten over this hyper-intellectualism, I moved into biographies for bedtime, enjoying the expansion of self into another’s life as I left my own for the night. Then in my forties there was a phase of fiction of the darker sort: I particularly remember reading the novels of....
Tags
-
A Poem is a Walk
One of the students in my Glen Online course, "Poetry as a Spiritual Practice," emailed me to ask what exactly I meant by “strolling along with a poem.” In the lecture for the lesson she was working on, I’d said that “I sometimes read a poem as if I were taking a stroll through it or along with it. The stroll is leisurely, because poetry never rushes us. Poetry paces itself so that its rhythms, its sound-echoes....
Tags
Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
Tag Search
