While I recognize his genius, both as a groundbreaking poet and one-man PR machine, I’ve never been much of a Whitmaniac. Even if it was just a literary device, his boundless grandiosity has always been something of a turnoff. And it wasn’t just a literary device—this was a man who described his own personality as…

Having written most recently about the late actor Paul Scofield, and his rendering of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, I can’t help but do a little “compare and contrast” with the Showtime series, The Tudors, now in its second season. Of course, it’s not a fair match-up: Michael Hirst,…

I don’t know whether it’s because it’s almost Eastern Orthodox Holy Week or the fact that I will turn forty this year, but I am preoccupied by the idea that things, generally, are falling apart, and vastly in need of renewal. I am feeling the press of mortality. Not long ago I found myself standing…

Last week, I left my solitary writing table in Washington, DC, and took the train to Boston to visit a friend whose creative journey began with classical piano performance and now, a short lifetime later, has found a waystation in video art. Reunited, she was eager to show me the fruits of her current project.…

I pray Congress never declares a “National Creative Nonfiction Month.” National month-hood seems, for the most part, public admission of an honorable, if forlorn, marginality, stuffy afternoon teas held for the aged maiden aunts of a country’s consciousness. It’s possible there is–unknown to me–a federally-recognized “National White Male History Month,” but a quick glance my…

At a recent retreat that I was leading on meditating with poetry, a participant came up to me at break and said “but you’re going to distinguish poetry from prayer, aren’t you?—talk about how poetry is not the same as prayer?” I thought about this during the break, and flipped through the notebook I carry…

I was stacking wood Saturday when my plumber, Bud, stopped by. He was checking on the work of Loquacious Hank, his new subcontractor, who had replaced my kitchen ceiling. This related to the resolution of what Bud tactfully refers to as my plumbing “dilemmas,” which came with the house and never end. We talked about…

At the beginning of the score of his Valses nobles et sentimentales, composer Maurice Ravel placed a dedication based a quote from Henri de Régnier: “le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d’une occupation inutile” (to the delightful and always novel pleasure of a useless occupation). Ravel’s sly and somewhat dandyish acknowledgment of the apparent uselessness…

In a film without words (or more precisely, with only two minutes of them), it’s a tautology to say that the visual experience overwhelms all other cinematic considerations. If the cinematographer doesn’t do his job here, then the experience is no better than thumbing through a very long coffee table book. But after the first…

It was time to incorporate. Given the tax incentives to do so as a screenwriter, it was time to become a company of one. To be sure, the spiritual correlatives were not lost on me either, for which reason I had decided well in advance that when the time came to make it official, I…