Birthday Poem Birthday Poem
Hot, rained-on, packed-down straw, strewn then abandoned between the rows of eggplant, tomato plants, onion, and herbs catches the evening's last September gnats in pale mats and ...
Jun 13, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Lynne McMahon
Backbeat in China Backbeat in China
A hundred days ago Wu'er Kaixi was a fugitive.... Yesterday, before an audience of 800 Americans and Chinese at Brandeis University, he showed what brought a 21-year-old Beijing N...
Jun 13, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Global Rights: The Movies Global Rights: The Movies
As all reputable news outlets assure us, privatization benefits everyone--which is lucky, since these same outlets report that privatization is inevitable. We live out a happy fat...
Jun 6, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
‘Blue Clear Down’ ‘Blue Clear Down’
Late in her life, Lorine Niedecker collected several dozen of her poems in handmade books that she gave to three friends. One poem common to all three books is "Who Was Mary Shell...
Jun 6, 2002 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella
Testing Times in Higher Ed Testing Times in Higher Ed
The SAT has been on the ropes lately. The University of California system has threatened to quit using the test for its freshman admissions, arguing that the exam has done more ha...
Jun 6, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Peter Sacks
Ghazal for Lauren Ghazal for Lauren
Sister, they say heed the hymn in your heart. You've learned you've an odd rhythm in your heart. You and I versus our brothers: pitched war. The four of us in the swim of your ...
May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Leslie Chang
Barnett Newman and the Heroic Sublime Barnett Newman and the Heroic Sublime
Henry James could not resist giving the hero of his 1877 novel The American the allegorical name "Newman," but he went out of his way to describe him as a muscular Christian, to d...
May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto
Singing to Power Singing to Power
British folk-rocker Billy Bragg has to be the only popular musician who could score some airtime with a song about the global justice movement. The first single from Bragg's En...
May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Hillary Frey
‘Trembling…Can Be Heard’ ‘Trembling…Can Be Heard’
A young man of 16, visiting his cousins in Calcutta in a house in a "middle-middle-class area," has just published his first poem. This not-yet-poet from Bombay is the narrator of...
May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Amitava Kumar
The Browning of America The Browning of America
In the past two decades, Richard Rodriguez has offered us a gamut of anecdotes, mostly about himself in action in an environment that is not always attuned to his own inner life. ...
May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans