David Matthews Portable Bohemia

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,...

Aosta is a town of some 34,000 in the Italian Alps between France and Switzerland. It is here that deputy police chief Rocco Schiavone...

The outpouring of affection for poet Mary Oliver (1935–2019) in the days following her death has been remarkable. Some pretty big names...

My old friend Chuck Oliveros called to chat. The conversation commenced with baseball, specifically the pursuit of free agents Bryce...

The first full calendar year of retirement is in the books. The real work goes on as I try to keep faith with the dream of being a poet I...

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art: I warmed both hands before the fire of life;...

Autumn is in the air, as they say. The week has seen daily showers and temperatures no higher than 70. The change of season stirs that...

This is the conclusion of a two-part essay. Part I was published August 28, 2018. The going gets thorny when Jordan Peterson moves away...

The strange and curious case of Jordan Peterson could be the scenario for a television minidrama scripted by a disciple of Ayn Rand. An...