Reading
For six decades or more, Gary Snyder has written a poetry of experience. And a poetry, almost always, of a brusque wisdom with the quality—somehow, for me—of the weather in the Pacific Northwest. That lush cold, that abundance in the fog. Here is “For the Children,” from his collection Turtle Island, published in 1974 by New Directions—sounding to me like it was written yesterday, for us and our awful moment:
The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
Then the poem lets in the dream, the idealism, and you can’t tell, in the second stanza, if the voice wants to mock or affirm that idealism, that dream:
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
In the third and fourth stanzas—and this is the turn that leaves me blown open—the poet grounds us in the learnings of human experience, lays them down in the language, sturdy and not wasting a letter, as the poem ends:
To help celebrate our twenty-fifth year of being on the information superhighway, we have reached out to some of our current and former columnists for check-ins and updates. Today’s columnist, John Moe, is a long-time, hall-of-fame contributor to the Internet Tendency. His Pop Song Correspondences first appeared on our site in 2004. In 2014, he put out an entire (and hilarious) book of them. We’re happy to have John back on the site today with a brand-new letter.
Dear Mayor Slick,
The Indiana Department of Safety has contracted my firm to evaluate the causes of the ineffective city government and crumbling infrastructure in and around the city of Rocknrollsburg (formerly Fort Wayne). We have been performing inspections and attending city government meetings or “concerts” for several months, and we present here a summary of our findings.
- by Aeon Video
- by Dan Simpson
As the fragile truce between Hamas and Israel continues to yield the release of hostages and prisoners, Israel is vowing to escalate the war.
The post Prisoners, Propaganda, and the Battle Over the Gaza War Narrative appeared first on The Intercept.
Amjad, a 45-year-old olive harvester living in the city of Qalqilya in the West Bank, has worked on a plot of land since the age of seven. The land, which has been in his family for generations, holds a special significance. ‘Working on the land is a form of worship and one of the rituals […]