Tate Street – A Front Porch For Writers

What Can Poetry Do? (Sun Bear by Matthew Zapruder)

Is a question posed in the title of a poem in Matthew Zapruder’s newest collection, Sun Bear (Copper Canyon 2014). And although the question is already a kind of [...]
So Fearsome a Blue; or, From Grandmother’s House We Go (Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore)

In Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal, the forest, the mountains, the snow and, most importantly, the ice—the beautiful, terrible, infinite ice!—inspire a breathless, speechless wonder. [...]

Favorite Poems: Hopkins, Dickinson

Go on a date with Mortality as Baker reads Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" and learn how edgy and pioneering Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover" is with Melissa Stein. [...]
Favorite Poems: Turner, Wyatt
Favorite Poems: Wheatley, Carroll
Favorite Poems: Islam, Hopkins

A Prison Wherever He Turned (Stoner by John Williams)

July 22, 2017

The plot of John Williams’ 1965 novel, Stoner (NYRB Classics, 2006): Young man becomes assistant professor at University of Missouri, lives unhappy life, has undistinguished career, dies. You can hardly be blamed if you don’t find this particularly enticing, but make no mistake: Stoner (last name of the protagonist—sorry to disappoint) is a work of almost unbearable beauty. [...]
I’ll Come Back Once You’re Dead (Henri Duchemin and His Shadows by Emmanual Bove, trans. Alyson Waters)
So Fearsome a Blue; or, From Grandmother’s House We Go (Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore)
The American Uncanny (American Innovations: Stories by Rivka Galchen)

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