A Web Exclusive Interview with Gregory and Suzanne Wolfe
By Interview Issue 60
As Image celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year, we decided to ask Gregory and Suzanne M. Wolfe, the founders of the journal, a little bit about how it all began. Image: Before we get to the matter of why you both founded Image, let me ask a different question. Who were you—as people—when you…
Read MoreA Conversation with Thomas Lynch
By Interview Issue 59
Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of poetry: Skating with Heather Grace (Knopf), Grimalkin & Other Poems (Jonathan Cape), and Still Life in Milford (Jonathan Cape and W.W. Norton). His essay collection The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (Norton) won the Heartland Prize for nonfiction and the American Book Award, was…
Read MoreFully Human
By Essay Issue 60
LAST NIGHT I watched—mesmerized, despite its near three-hour length—Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, a minimalist science fiction epic set in a dreary, bombed-out industrial wasteland. The title does not derive from the contemporary connotation of sexual predator, but goes back to the sort of guide who leads hunters to where game can be found. In fact,…
Read MoreGiotto’s Ratio
By Essay Issue 59
The following remarks were given at Villa Agape in Florence, Italy, on the opening evening of Image’s Florence Seminar, September 14, 2008. IMAGE is a journal devoted exclusively to contemporary literature and art—to the present moment—but here we are in the cradle of the Renaissance. We have not come out of mere antiquarian curiosity,…
Read MoreThe Tragic Sense of Life
By Essay Issue 61
WHEN I first arrived at Oxford University in the early 1980s to pursue graduate work, I was all swagger on the outside, but that was to conceal the soft center of terror within. I had gone from being a big man on a small Midwestern campus situated between two cornfields to a nobody at an…
Read MoreThirty Seconds Away
By Essay Issue 63
The following is an expanded version of the introductory remarks delivered at Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 27, 2009. The theme for both the workshop and Image’s twentieth anniversary year, now concluding, was “Fully Human: Art and the Religious Sense.” BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop of…
Read MoreThe King’s Great Matter …and Ours
By Essay Issue 64
THE ROYAL SOAP OPERA that is the life and reign of Henry VIII evokes endless fascination both in the realms of scholarship and the popular imagination. Erudite tomes heavy with footnotes, racy novels the size of toaster ovens, and sumptuously staged television miniseries pour forth in a steady stream. And what’s not to like? For…
Read MoreBecoming the Other
By Essay Issue 65
IN THE FIRST DAYS of May, 1610, the renowned Confucian scholar Li Madou lay dying in his home in Beijing. Hundreds of the leading citizens of the Chinese capital came to pay their respects to the man whose books on ethics, mathematics, friendship, and the mysteries of life and death had been read and circulated…
Read MoreWho’s Afraid of Geoffrey Hill
By Essay Issue 66
Already, like a disciplined scholar, I piece fragments together, past conjecture, Establishing true sequences of pain; For so it is proper to find value In a bleak skill, as in the thing restored: The long-lost words of choice and valediction. ————————————-— Geoffrey Hill, “The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz, I” Oxford University has a new Professor…
Read MoreStalking the Spirit
By Essay Issue 67
The following is adapted from the commencement address for the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing delivered on August 7, 2010. THIS PROGRAM IS blessed to have its intensive, ten-day residencies at two of the most beautiful places on the continent: the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and…
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