Posts Tagged ‘memory’
Transcendence: A Tribute to William Christenberry (1936-2016)
January 3, 2017
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop said, with irony. Still, it’s true that we mislay so many things over a lifetime that we become quite adept at bearing our deprivations. By the end, it’s a wonder that we have so much left to convey; the reading of wills should be bankrupt…
Read MoreThe Patron Saint of Losers, Part 2
December 7, 2016
This post, which appears as the Editorial Statement in Image issue 90, is continued from yesterday. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, a contemporary of Shakespeare, knew his share of failure. As a young man he went off to serve in the military—whether to escape arrest for wounding a man in a duel or for some other…
Read MoreThe Patron Saint of Losers, Part 1
December 6, 2016
This post appears as the Editorial Statement in Image issue 90. One of the stranger conversations I’ve ever had took place during my senior year of college. I was attending a conference, and during one of the coffee breaks I was talking with a scholar who had taken a shine to me. He asked if…
Read MoreThe Ghosts of Home
November 30, 2016
When I visit my family in northern Minnesota, I find myself on the same roads I’ve known—back and forth—since I was a child. Often I ride with others because I can’t orient, even in my small town and the outskirts made of barely-there townships and roads that veer only toward themselves. I think of small…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Poetry Is the Spirit of the Dead, Watching,” Part I
November 25, 2016
Where do our words come from? And our lives: how do they connect with those (whether persons or words) now dead but perhaps living on—in ways we can almost touch, almost speak? These are the complex questions that Margaret Gibson raises and wraps her own language around in this remarkable poem. For all their complexity,…
Read MoreAn Interview with Newbery Medal-Winning Author Clare Vanderpool, Part 1
November 8, 2016
Clare Vanderpool, Newbery-Medal winning author of the novels Moon over Manifest (Delacorte, 2010) and Navigating Early (Delacorte, 2013), got her start by attending a writing workshop at The Milton Center, with which Image was associated in its early years and whose programs are now run by Image. While under a Milton fellowship in the mid-90s,…
Read MoreWhat My Kid Knew about Kubo
September 14, 2016
[Spoiler alert: This post is about the end of the movie, Kubo and the Two Strings. However, since, I believe, the ending nearly spoils the film itself, you can read this and still enjoy the other, real pleasures of the movie.] In the dramatic climax of Kubo and the Two Strings, our young hero defies…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “I Am Poured Out Like Water”
July 15, 2016
What attracts me to this poem is something deliberately absent yet evocatively present: baptism in a river. Starting from the very first line—during monastic prayer, the speaker’s mis-chanting “Lord’s forever” as “Lord’s river”—rivers are central to each vignette. There’s the creek where, as a kid, the speaker “took a girl down to the river to…
Read MoreThe Dragon and the Yahrzeit Candle: On Forgetting and Remembering, Part 3
June 30, 2016
Continued from yesterday and Tuesday. In Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, David Hinton observes, “We tend to ignore the disappearing, the forgetfulness, but all day long, day in and day out, forgetfulness keeps us woven into dragon’s traceless transformations.” The dragon, he explained earlier, is “China’s mythological embodiment of all creation…
Read MoreThe Dragon and the Yahrzeit Candle: On Forgetting and Remembering, Part 2
June 29, 2016
Continued from yesterday. I dive into the pool. My body remembers water. My body remembers how to swim. My arm swings overhead, my arm follows through, my hand plunges into the water, pushing water, propelling my body forward down the lane. It seems to happen naturally, automatically. I don’t need to think to swim. I…
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