Best Of TSHS

Tight Pants

January 24, 2011

In lieu of the recent rise in popularity of “jeggings,” we refer to the New York poet Frank O’Hara for his philosophies on poetry as presented in “Personism: A Manifesto“ I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing [...]

Woolf on Writers and Readers

December 1, 2010

Excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s famous essay, Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown: “In the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe. You have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You [...]

Seamus Heaney, Hercules, and Antaeus

November 22, 2010

With Seamus Heaney’s recent publication of Human Chain, we hope you’d also enjoy hearing a little insight into his career as a poet. You can read along with the pdf of the entire speech here. Excerpt from Seamus Heaney’s Birthday Speech: 13th APRIL 2009 “In Greek mythology, [...]

The Great Joyful Swamp

November 20, 2010

From Charles Wright’s introduction to The Best American Poetry 2008 telling us we’d better hop to: Everyone talks about the “great health” of American poetry nowadays. And it’s hard to fault that. There are very few bad poems being published, very few. On the other [...]

Monday or Tuesday

November 15, 2010

A short story (or “sketch,” if you like) by Virginia Woolf from 1921, when she was writing toward the voice she’d eventually fully develop in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Her insistence that the imagination is as real as anything else is, well, awesome: Monday or Tuesday [...]