Activity

I am sure the natural world gave some pleasure to the people who worked the land for those four hundred years. But we will not find in the written record what sunlight looked like to them in the leaves of trees along the Rappahannock River in the spring, or what the sky looked like when tens of tho…

Sugar is not native to North America. It’s indigenous to South Asia. The Arabs took it from India to the East and Spain in the eighth century and Christopher Columbus brought it from Spain to Hispaniola on his second voyage, where, as he thought it might, it flourished and quickly became a cash cro…

I did not get much of a sense of the poetry of Kim Nam-ju. It was, of course, unavailable. The few poems I did see were unpublished English translations of what seemed like youthful work. There was a description of a field, I remember, seen from a prison train, a sense of homesickness. Another poet…

I could say to students: if you substitute imagination for love, you have in hand one of Wallace Stevens’s persistent thoughts about the world, and our experience of it, and the nature of knowledge. Bronze then becomes a word to think about, the bronzes of autumnal New England and the sun-gilded br…

In talking about this with Judith, I was able to quote a haiku that I love by the nineteenth-century poet Kobayashi Issa, which goes like this—seventeen syllables in the Japanese:

     The man pulling radishes  
   Pointed my way  
     With a radish.

Can you imag…