Author Archives: wcd2
James Baldwin’s friends
July 31, 2013 Well, at least they went to high school together, that accounts for it: DeWitt Clinton High School, in the north Bronx. By the time James Baldwin and Richard Avedon brought out Nothing Personal (1964), they’d known … Continue reading
Robert Pinsky, Ginza Samba
July 24, 2013 For years I hadn’t gone much beyond his translation of the Inferno. I’d noticed a couple of things I didn’t like (might even have gone looking for them), and just stopped there, his own poetry getting all … Continue reading
On Carl Sandburg’s “Buttons”
“Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?” wonders Elizabeth Bishop in her whimsical poem “The Map” (1946). It’s an odd sort of utopian fantasy, where the land and sea, once depicted by the map-maker, produce their own … Continue reading
Natasha Trethewey, Emily Dickinson: Partners in Crime
June 12, 2013 In her interview in the LA Review of Books (just out), Natasha Trethewey mentions only Derek Walcott and Robert Penn Warren as poets who touch her at moments of mass fatalities. But I’d like to think that … Continue reading
Gatsby Made Great
I’ve been trying to figure out why the ending of the recent Gatsby film felt so flat to me, and I think it’s because it lacks the animating pathos of the final confrontation of origin stories that drove the plot … Continue reading
Langston Hughes’s Children Literature
May 31, 2013 My class, “Regional, National, Global,” has no special focus on children’s literature, but it does seem to come up a lot. I think it’s because of Langston Hughes — the uncertain borders of his poetry, holding a … Continue reading