Today celebrates the release of Luke Burgis’s masterwork The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. with St. Martin’s Press. Given the number of Amazon reviews, it’s already a stunning success.

My morning was spent online, at a zoom celebration of the release as a dozen-or-so of us gathered to discuss the book on Zoom. Today’s release of book follows the astonishing success of his 2025 Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.

Leading economist Tyler Cowen, author of The Complacent Class led the praise: “”Social contagion is the most important phenomenon of our time. The One and the Ninety-Nine is the place to go to learn about it.” And so we will.

My copy of the book hasn’t arrived, so I’m relying on Luke Burgis’s recent discussion of Judas on his Substack to whet our appetite. Here’s Luke’s discussion of “Political Judas.”

Like everything Luke Burgis writes, it’s well worth your time. And I’ll be writing more about it in days to come.

French theorist René Girard‘s original use of the term “political atheist” came in his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In it, he referred to the French writer Stendhal as an “atheist in politics” (athée en politique). Stendhal’s spirit of political atheism is embodied in Julien Sorel, the protagonist of his novel The Red and the Black.¹⁵

Burgis writes:

When Julien learns that his former employer has switched parties, he smiles. Girard comments on this scene: “Julien savors the ‘conversion’… as a music lover who sees a melodramatic theme re-appear under a new orchestral disguise. Most men are taken by disguises. Stendhal places a smile on Julien’s lips so that his readers will not be deceived.”¹⁶ Julien, the political atheist, sees the political machinations of his day as the superficial games that they are; when Stendhal places a smile on his lips, he is hinting that Julien sees through the mimesis. He refuses to believe in any type of deeper meaning that others might attach to a turncoat.

To the naive, every conversion—whether political or religious—is genuine. The Stendhalian revelation was his pulling back of the veil on the real dynamics of superficial change through his characters.

Monsieur de Rênal’s “false” conversion, as well as Julien’s reaction to it, is reminiscent of the biblical Judas and the illusion of his outward signs and appearances. When witnessing a woman pouring perfumed oil to anoint Christ’s feet, Judas said the politically correct thing: “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”¹⁷ In the very next sentence, he is called a thief by the Gospel writer.

But Judas is more than a thief. He is also a cynic. He would later sell Christ for one-tenth the amount of those three hundred denarii that he suggested giving to the poor. The words that he speaks with his lips, and the signs he communicates with his actions (he kissed Christ as a “sign” of his friendship, which simultaneously signaled his betrayal) are but false signals of a false conversion—of an interior disposition that has, by this point in the story, become that of the Machiavellian political atheist. Like Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s story, he does not hesitate to wrap himself in false appearances to accomplish his political aims.

“Judas, however, quickly migrates from the Machiavellian to the black-pilled. And this darker type of political atheist rejects not only religious belief and belief in politics, he also ceases to believe in his own ability to act within or upon political structures. Unlike the Machiavellian political atheist who finds a way to survive within the existing structures—maybe even exploit them—the black-pilled political atheist believes that current political systems are thoroughly corrupt and unsalvageable. He believes that the only thing reasonable for a self-respecting person to do is remove oneself from participating in such a system.”

Read the whole thing on Luke’s Substack here.

Meanwhile, Ted Gioia over at The Honest Broker (and pictured at right) is also having Girardian fever. He lists “Twelve Things I Learned from René Girard.” Here’s one observation: “”Girard devoted his life to exposing the lies behind fashions and trends. And now, after his death, he is fashionable and trendy. It’s almost like some kind of punishment.”

Read it here. An excerpt:

4. Imitation leads to blood feuds and reciprocal violence—escalating like Mafia wars—which are traditionally resolved by the sacrifice of a scapegoat.

In ancient times, an actual bloody sacrifice took place. In other situations, a ritualized sacrifice is served up. Today, it might be somebody blacklisted in Hollywood or canceled on social media. (Heroes often turn into scapegoats—see item #5 below).

To halt (temporarily) the blood feud, violent impulses of the combatants are targeted at the scapegoat, instead of at each other. (Here’s an example: After 9/11, Democrats and Republicans came to together and focused their hostility on non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, creating a short-lived lull in their political feuding.)

“Nine-tenths of politics,” Girard asserts, is “choosing the same scapegoat as everyone else.”

Read Ted’s whole catalog of mimeticism here.

ФPhото: Sefa Karacan

Last week Stanford had a chance to see a riveting new 90-minute film, Lyuba’s Hope. It’s a work-in-progress, following Russian lawyer, human rights activist, and political candidate Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer and former head of Alexei Navalny’s Anti Corruption Foundation. The Russian freedom fighter has survived hunger strikes, the attempted poisoning of her family members, multiple arrests, and exile, and more as she fearlessly paves the way for a democratic post-Putin Russia. Read more about her film on the website: lyubas-hope.com

The cliché “influencer” is an understatement; She runs a YouTube channel with over 600,000 subscribers, where she covers topics including corruption in Putin’s regime, the war in Ukraine, and other current events. She has received the Sergei Magnitsky Award, honoring her contributions to the fight for democracy in Russia. In 2019, the BBC included her in the “Leadership” category on its list of 100 Inspiring and Influential Women from around the world.

Her Undesirables won a Student Academy Award in 2001.

Listen to the discussion after the screening here.

***

Filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya she has worked for dozens of programs for Discovery Channel, National Geographic, History Channel, Greenpeace, and Animal Planet as producer and senior editor. She also worked on two Academy Award-winning features and one Academy nominated film as a researcher, and directed an award-winning film, Holy Warriors. A Producers Guild of America member, she is the first Russian female director to be shortlisted for the Oscars for her documentary film, Women of the Gulag.

The film was screened at Stanford on June 3. There’s no way yet for the general public to see the film – it is still undergoing final editing tweaks. The filmmakers still have two months to go and need $50,000 to complete it.

You can make anonymous and tax exempt PayPal donations here.

You can sign up on the mailing list below, and you’ll be the first to hear about screenings:

https://lyubas-hope.com/mailing-list/

***

The people who made the film happen: Producer Paul Gregory (above) is Cullen Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, a research fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, and emeritus chair of the International Advisory Board of the Kiev School of Economics. He is the author or coauthor of twelve books and more than a hundred articles on economic history, the Soviet economy, transition economies, comparative economics, and economic demography. As a producer, Gregory has worked with director Yarovskaya on the documentary film “Women of the Gulag,” which was shortlisted for the Oscars.

Above also, a few snapshots from this week’s screening of Lyuba’s Hope at Stanford with Lyubov Sobol, Katherine Stoner, Larry Diamond, and producer Paul Gregory (pictured below).

Background on producers and filmmakers here.

(Photo Credit: Hoover Institution, Patrick Beaudouin)

Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz lived longer in California than anywhere else in his life – more years than he spent in Lithuania, where he was born; more years than he lived in Poland, the home of his beloved Mother Tongue.

After defecting from Communist Poland in 1951, he found a home and a job at the University of California at Berkeley. That was where he taught generations of Berkeley students, and some of them became his translators (Lillian Vallee, Robert Pinsky, Richard Lourie, Clare Cavanagh among them). It’s also where he met the Pulitzer-prizewinning poet Robert Hass, a former poet laureate, who would become his foremost translator.

Part of my role in life: giving Berkeley tours to the Polish literati visiting the Miłosz landmarks in Berkeley, as I did yesterday. Enter Barbara Gruszka-Zych, who is writing a book about Miłosz, Our Poet, Czesław Miłosz. Voices from Lithuania, Poland, and America, hence the pilgrimage. Photographer Grzegorz Lityński, a colleague, collaborates with her on a range of projects, and took the photos below.

Berkeley’s Prof. John Connelly was our host. At bottom, the Newman Center where, after the death of his first wife Janina Miłosz, the poet married his second wife, an academic from Georgia, Carol Thigpen Miłosz.

At the Dominican Friary in Kraków. Wow!

Experience the medieval world in real time, right now. I’ve loved its aesthetics since childhood. I remember roaming the Detroit Institute of Arts, seeking out the icons, the stone effigies, the paintings of willowy women in long gowns. But most of all I loved the music.

So imagine my thrill in Kraków, when I walked along Stolarska Street and heard the faint sound of medieval chant wafting from the Dominican Priory in Kraków. I tiptoed in to catch the last day as the gorgeous music workshop was winding up for the year.

Want to get a taste of the music? Here’s your chance. Registration is now open for the biggest liturgical music conference in Europe, held by the Dominican Friars of Poland.

Seven days. 450 singers. Historic churches. Plainchant and polyphony. Each summer the Dominican Liturgical Center of Kraków organizes a week-long conference on liturgical music, with workshops, concerts, talks on spirituality and sacred art, etc., directed by Father Łukasz Miśko OP. It all takes place at the 13th century medieval priory of Holy Trinity in the heart of the old town Kraków and gathers over 450 music lovers from Poland and, in the last four years, from all over the world! In 2021, we successfully expanded our program by adding workshops, liturgies, and talks in English.

The conference is called Extraordinary Music Workshop (click below to watch EMW 2023 recap video) and is designed so that participants can experience the profound beauty of ancient musical traditions of the Church in their organic development and in the spirit of continuity. According to Father Miśko, that is why we offer workshops in Gregorian and Byzantine chant, as well as in traditional and contemporary sacred polyphony.

Go to the website to learn more about our program, watch videos and see pictures from previous years, along with testimonies of participants:
www.extraordinary.music.

The next week-long event is coming up fast. It will be held in Kraków, July 6-12, 2026. Participants will study choral music with Dr. Elena Bird-Zolnick and Mr. Christopher Mueller, learn Gregorian Chant with Prof. Susi Ferfoglia and Prof. Michal Slawecki and even dive into the mysterious beauty of Byzantine Chant with Mr. Andriy Shkrabyuk. Learn more and sign up: www.extraordinary.music.

Past faculty has included, among others, Fr. Robert Mehlhart, OP, PhD (President of Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome), Fr. James Moore, OP, DMA (Oakland, CA), Fr. Innocent Smith, OP, PhD (Washington, DC), Dr. Elena Bird-Zolnick (St. Paul, MN), Mr. Christopher Mueller (Louisville, KY), Ms. Grace Feltoe (Perth, Australia), Fr. Dawid Kusz, OP, DMA (Kraków, Poland), Fr. Lawrence Lew, OP (Oxford, UK), and Mr. Andriy Shkrabyuk (Lviv, Ukraine).

Here’s a recap video from a few years ago. It’s inspiring More photographs here. More videos, too.

Below, Father Łukasz Miśko, the man behind the Extraordinary Music Workshop.

Fr. Łukasz Miśko

Herzog quibbles at a point. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

The Another Look is a community book club for everyone, founded by National Medal of Arts winner (and Stanford professor) Tobias Wolff and I launched it in 2012. It’s offered online and in-person, and currently boasts what I believe is the largest book club in the world with 4,088 members. Join our mailing list here, and we’ll inform you of upcoming events.

Perhaps our greatest moment was on a rainy night, February 2, 2016, we featured an onstage event at Stanford with legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog discussing J.A. Baker‘s The Peregrine – and so much more. The film is now available on youtube, in a full-length version (here) and a highlights version (here). Or look to the links below.

Another Look’s director, Prof. Robert Harrison, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and host for the popular “Entitled Opinions” radio talk show, was the interlocutor for the discussion.

The event was covered by Caille Millner in the San Francisco Chronicle (here). Meanwhile, you can watch the highlights version below, and the full hour-and-a-half discussion below that.

I return to these maxims which enjoin us to “thwart institutional cowardice.” And this koan: “Manuever and mislead, but always deliver.” You’ll find favorites of your own.

True story: At the carefully managed 2016 event, I was appointed as the person to keep the crowd from swarming Herzog after the onstage conversation. It wasn’t too cautious: afterward the crowd did climb onstage, as the managers of the had event feared. A solitary woman trying to manage a mob. Herzog gently pushed me away, and let the crowd storm him. He was laughing, and he loved it.

If you’d like to read my interview with artist/photographer Lena Herzog, Werner’s wife, go here.

https://cynthialhaven.substack.com/p/weldon-kees-brilliant-polymathic

VILLANELLE

The crack is moving down the wall.
Defective plaster isn’t all the cause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

It’s mildly cheering to recall
That every building has its little flaws.
The crack is moving down the wall.

Here in the kitchen, drinking gin,
We can accept the damndest laws.
We must refrain until the roof falls in.

And though there’s no one here at all,
One searches every room because
The crack is moving down the wall.

Repairs? But how can one begin?
The lease has warnings buried in each clause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

These nights one hears a creaking in the hall,
The sort of thing that gives one pause.
The crack is moving down the wall.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

With Irina in the Santa Cruz Mountains

Photos by Linda Cicero.

Michel Serres is one of France’s best-known public intellectuals. He has a regular radio spot, and publication of his books is an event.

“Why do I speak on the radio? It’s very simple,” he explained. “A class that I teach may have 25 students; a radio audience 4 million. That’s interesting for a professor who is trying to raise the level of cultural life.”

America? Different story. A Google search turns up a piecemeal spray of websites in English; it is difficult to get a comprehensive notion of what, exactly, one of the world’s preeminent philosophes is about.

Serres is modest about the size of his French audience, but at Stanford, humility is unnecessary: In most quarters, he is an inconnu, although he has been a member of its faculty for nearly 30 years. But the genial near-octogenarian has a big story to tell—nothing less than the grand récit, a meta-narrative that offers a sweeping, teleological worldview.

According to Robert Pogue Harrison, chair of the Department of French and Italian, “For the last 150 years, Western philosophy primarily has been a story of telling philosophers that they cannot do this, that or the other. They cannot synthesize, philosophize, cannot tell the grand story.” This idea of the grand récit, he said, “is distinctly non-postmodern, maybe even non-modern.”

“They come from a tradition that thinks big and bold.”

The reasons Serres is little known, even at Stanford, are many. He has an anomalous appointment as a permanent visiting faculty member, teaching for a few weeks during the spring and fall quarters and then returning to his Paris digs.

Moreover, as a writer (he has written 48 books), he is renowned as a stylist—and style is the hardest element to replicate in another language. His writing has been described as classical, poetic, a little bit arcane and virtually untranslatable. Understandably, then, he has never quite felt at home in English; although he is fluent, he clearly prefers a French conversation.

Hence, the largest reason for his American low profile: He teaches only in French. His invisibility notwithstanding, Serres has given Stanford much more than he is ever likely to take: Stanford has an especial cachet in the Francophile world, for Serres is a member of the Académie Française, one of its 40 immortels. It’s the highest honor that can be bestowed on an intellectual in France. Of the three immortels linked with American academia, two are at Stanford—the other is Serres’ friend René Girard, the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, Emeritus.

“They are very well known as writers, but they have problems in France because they are unclassifiable. These kinds of people are disappearing. They don’t exist anymore—people who have encyclopedic knowledge, people who know civics, math, communication, science, anthropology. They are the rare and last humanists—what humanists used to be in the 16th century,” said Audrey Calefas, a doctoral candidate who has been Serres’ personal assistant for several years at Stanford (”out of friendship, really,” she added).

American universities are commonly thought to have a more free and open academic atmosphere—at least, a 1989 interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Raspiengeas made that assertion about Stanford, calling it a modern incarnation of Rabelais’ Abbey of Thélème, built by the giant Gargantua, which has a swimming pool, maid service and no clocks.

Harrison, a friend to both Serres and Girard, commented that they “belong to a generation of grand philosophes and French master thinkers”; both “come from a tradition that thinks big and bold.”

“France rewards boldness—always has.”

However, while both show “a grandeur of vision,” said Harrison, the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature, he noted that “they go about it slightly different ways.”

“René’s primary sphere of interest is primarily in human social relations, and the role in mimetic desire and sacrifice. For Michel, human behavior is one element among many others.”

Harrison cites Isaiah Berlin’s essay, which builds on a reference from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Hedgehogs, according to Berlin, see the world through the lens of a single, defining idea—think Dante, Plato or Pascal. Foxes cannot confine themselves to a single idea—Aristotle, Shakespeare, James Joyce.

Girard is a hedgehog; Serres is a fox. Girard drills deeper and deeper into one wellspring of thought; Serres’ thought is a huge map—or a Catherine wheel, unleashing intellectual fireworks. Girard is inward; Serres is extroverted and expansive. Perhaps that’s why the Times Literary Supplement referred to Serres as “a philosophe of wide-angled intelligence.”

Serres was born in 1930 in Agen, on the Garonne river in southwest France, the son of a bargeman. Friends say his humble country origins are key to understanding the richness of his thought and his fundamental decency.

He was studying mathematics at the Naval Academy when he found Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace. Largely because of that book’s impact on him, he left the academy and turned to philosophy. He entered the famous École Normale Supérieure (which Weil had attended) in 1952; he received a doctorate with a thesis on Leibniz’s philosophy in 1968. He was appointed to a chair in the history of science at the Sorbonne, where he taught for many years.

“France rewards boldness—always has.”

To tell the grand récit, said Harrison, Serres must trawl “the natural sciences, genetic science, all new biotic, evolutionary, cosmological discoveries” as well as the history of science, philosophy, literature and religion and bring them to bear on philosophy, concocting “a coherent theory of where we are in human knowledge.”

“And he’s doing that. Especially in the last five to seven years, his work of synthesis is very compelling.”

Serres weaves the history of science, mathematics, thermodynamics, chaos theory, Balzac, Proust, Zola and Chateaubriand into his reflections. His thinking perhaps is better known for its roads than its destinations, whether he’s discussing le tiers-instruit, the third element between antitheses, or the pervasive relationships between parasites and hosts in human affairs or bridges.

It’s impossible to present the full Serres banquet—there are too many dishes for that—but perhaps it’s possible to offer the tiniest hors d’oeuvre: an ongoing concern of Serres has been the nature of time. He said the nature of time is more like the experience of closing your eyes, when images, thoughts and memories come to you in a jumble.

In his book-length interview with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, he compares time to a handkerchief. Flattened on a table, the distance between points can be measured. But crumpled in one’s pocket, he wrote, “Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed.” If torn, two points that are close will suddenly become distant—time becomes topology, rather than linear geometry.

“As we experience time—as much in our inner senses as externally in nature, as much as le temps of history and as le temps of weather—it resembles this crumpled version much more than the flat, overly simplified one.”

Admittedly, he said, we need linear time for measurements, “but why extrapolate from it a general theory of time? People usually confuse time and the measurement of time, which is a metrical reading on a straight line” (emphasis in original).

Enrollment in his classes is not large. As Harrison noted, “His kind of philosophy is extremely demanding for students these days, because it presupposes a vast erudition in his students.”

Are his students destined for extinction? Serres himself is not optimistic about the future of humanities. What lies ahead?

“Death,” he says, and pauses. “Maybe.”

“I don’t know exactly, because I am not a prophet. But I am afraid that humanities are dying now because very few people now know the Latin language, know the Greek language, know Christian theology and so on,” he said. “Humanities is an endangered species.”

“I think humanism is in a very bad state now,” he said.

But if the class is any indication, many are ready to take the leap into his wide-ranging humanism, punctuated with his lengthy, memorized passages from Racine or du Bellay.

His class attracts an eclectic and loyal coterie beyond its enrolled students—three decades is time enough to accumulate a following. A typical class might include a Silicon Valley mogul and his wife, a prominent publisher from Paris, a Stanford physics professor emeritus.

“Michel Serres presents his lectures in the form of fascinating questions, which he gradually answers and makes you feel as if you were participating in the thought process. His thinking is innovative and dynamic,” said Hélène Laroche-Davis, professor of French and film studies at Notre Dame de Namur University.

Alix Marduel, a former internist at Stanford and now a Palo Alto-based venture capitalist, said that Serres brings one thing that is AWOL in most philosophical discussions: passion.

“He brings his personality into the room,” said Marduel, who has been attending the classes for several years. “He brings life to the dry and boring notion of how your mind works. He’s not afraid of putting himself on the line, and a lot of people are. A lot of philosophes are—that is why they are so boring.”

Serres describes his delivery this way: A professor is a sorcerer, and his job is to make a phantom appear. To that end, he makes noise, bangs drums, gesticulates, sings and dances. Suddenly, if he is successful, a door opens, and Philosophy appears—then the students need not listen to the professor anymore.

That, he said, is his “dream class.” And does he succeed? “The students can say; I cannot,” he replied.

Classes have been called “Socratic,” but the epithet doesn’t quite fit. Questions are limited to a few minutes at the end; most of the 90 minutes are a stand-and-deliver bravura performance, followed by applause.

“It’s not the typical seminar—much more like a coffeeshop conversation or salon kind of thing,” Calefas said. “Each time he does a new class, he never repeats himself.”

The observant may notice that, although Serres speaks extemporaneously, in front of him is a pile of typed pages. They are not notes but full lectures. He writes about 40 pages between classes, so it is all fresh in his mind when he speaks. Occasionally during his lecture he will pause, flipping through a dozen pages to catch up to his spoken words.

For the last few years, each course he has taught has turned into a book; for example, this year’s Écrivains, savants et philosophes font le tour du monde. This spring’s class—not surprisingly, perhaps, on writers and writing—is slated to be another book. Why this topic, now?

“Because it’s possible that it’s the last class in my life—one of my last classes—and it was a longstanding dream for me to speak about my conception of writing, my conception of the job of the writer.

“We don’t decide what to write. The text happens, and it’s not necessarily you who writes the book—it’s another who writes. It’s always better if it’s the double who writes. Every writer needs an angel or a Hermes.”

Serres said he has the feeling that when he writes a book, maybe he should not sign it. “Each book is carried by my double,” he said, with a charming and characteristically self-deprecating shrug.

Editor’s Note: The dark-haired woman who appears briefly in the background at the beginning of the film clip, wearing a red sweater (and asking the final question) – “C’est moi!”

Postscript: Read Michel Serres’s Stanford obituary here.

“His power is in the authenticity of his voice. He actually believes everything he says.” So says poet Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and a champion for poet Weldon Kees, who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955. We wrote about Kees yesterday here, and published Gioia’s new Youtube film.

Kees’s poem “For My Daughter” was written in the 1940, the year Nazi Germany invaded Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg), and France, leading to France's fall.

“Kees literally wishes, voluntarily, to make the human race extinct,” says Dana, ”Kees’s wishes to deny his own existence and the people who might have come from his own existence.” The world teetered on the brink of a catastrophic war..

You can read his poem, “For My Daughter,” here. And read yesterday’s post on Kees here.

From Dana Gioia: “I first discovered the poetry of Weldon Kees in 1976—fifty years ago—while working a summer job in Minneapolis. I came across a selection of his poems in a library anthology. I didn’t recognize his name. I might have skipped over the section had I not noticed in the brief headnote that he had died in San Francisco by leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. As a Californian in exile, I found that grim and isolated fact intriguing.”

More here.

JOSEPH BRODSKY: THIRTY YEARS LATER
By Alexander Veytsman

1.

The reason to return to Joseph Brodsky thirty years after his death—rather than twenty or forty—lies less in calendar fetishism than in a quiet numerical symmetry he himself would likely have appreciated. Brodsky died on January 28, 1996, five weeks before the thirtieth anniversary of Anna Akhmatova’s death on March 5, 1966. This coincidence is not biographical trivia; it establishes a symbolic bracket. Akhmatova’s moral and poetic authority shaped the post-Stalin thaw, while Brodsky’s work framed, perhaps even defined, the late-Soviet and immediate post-Soviet literary consciousness. Between 1966—Akhmatova’s death—and 1996—Brodsky’s—lies a thirty-year poetic era whose internal logic he helped articulate.

This does not mean that Brodsky “ruled” these decades in any institutional or generational sense. He did not preside over a school, nor did he anoint successors. Yet his voice—hardened by exile and sharpened by metaphysical rigor—became a kind of measure: of seriousness, of ethical resistance, of formal ambition. Whether anyone picked up an invisible baton after 1996 is an open question, and likely the wrong one. Literary epochs do not pass by inheritance. They blur, erode, overlap. Thirty years on, the outlines of Brodsky’s era are visible largely because the surrounding noise has begun, at last, to recede.

Anniversaries, as a rule, make poor soil for literature. They encourage sentimentality, ritualized praise, retrospective myth. And yet Brodsky himself made frequent, often ironic use of them. Dates, deaths, commemorations recur throughout his poetry and essays—not as occasions for reverence, but as prompts for resistance. Poems such as “On the Death of Zhukov” or “On the 100th Anniversary of Anna Akhmatova” turn historical markers into meditations on time’s indifference and language’s stubborn endurance.

In prose he was even more explicit. His two formidable essay collections, “Less Than One” and “On Grief and Reason”, repeatedly use commemorative moments as points of departure rather than closure. For Brodsky, an anniversary was not an endpoint but a provocation. It exposed the inadequacy of memory and tested the durability of form. Writing about him at a thirty-year remove follows that same logic: the round number functions not as a conclusion, but as an invitation to think again.

There is also the question of language. Brodsky preferred English for his essays while continuing to write poetry almost exclusively in Russian. This was not a gesture of renunciation but of strategy. English offered him distance—moral, intellectual, stylistic. In “A Room and a Half”, perhaps his most cited essay, English becomes an escape language, one his parents never mastered but instinctively reached toward, as though displacement itself carried a promise of survival.

To write about Brodsky in English, then, is not merely practical. It places the discussion on the ground where he chose to argue, explain, and sometimes defend himself. Poetry remained the realm of ultimate risk and intimacy—hence Russian. Prose belonged to reason, memory, polemic—hence English.

Anniversaries, as a rule, make poor soil for literature. They encourage sentimentality, ritualized praise, retrospective myth. And yet Brodsky himself made frequent, often ironic use of them. Dates, deaths, commemorations recur throughout his poetry and essays—not as occasions for reverence, but as prompts for resistance. Poems such as “On the Death of Zhukov” or “On the 100th Anniversary of Anna Akhmatova” turn historical markers into meditations on time’s indifference and language’s stubborn endurance.

In prose he was even more explicit. His two formidable essay collections, “Less Than One” and “On Grief and Reason”, repeatedly use commemorative moments as points of departure rather than closure. For Brodsky, an anniversary was not an endpoint but a provocation. It exposed the inadequacy of memory and tested the durability of form. Writing about him at a thirty-year remove follows that same logic: the round number functions not as a conclusion, but as an invitation to think again.

There is also the question of language. Brodsky preferred English for his essays while continuing to write poetry almost exclusively in Russian. This was not a gesture of renunciation but of strategy. English offered him distance—moral, intellectual, stylistic. In “A Room and a Half”, perhaps his most cited essay, English becomes an escape language, one his parents never mastered but instinctively reached toward, as though displacement itself carried a promise of survival.

To write about Brodsky in English, then, is not merely practical. It places the discussion on the ground where he chose to argue, explain, and sometimes defend himself. Poetry remained the realm of ultimate risk and intimacy—hence Russian. Prose belonged to reason, memory, polemic—hence English.

2.

Brodsky’s reputation after death has followed a familiar, if accelerated, trajectory. Praise and dismissal have arrived in nearly equal measure, often neutralizing one another. He is revered as a moral figure and criticized as imperious; admired for formal mastery and faulted for emotional reserve. None of this, however, bears heavily on his standing as a poet—or even as a human being.

What it does suggest is that he has moved through the first two stages of literary afterlife: canonization and backlash. The first turns a writer into a monument; the second tries to dismantle it. Only later comes a third stage, when the work is no longer defended or attacked but simply read. Thirty years on, Brodsky seems to be approaching that quieter threshold.

He famously asked friends not to write biographies of him. The request was understandable. He distrusted reductive narratives and resisted the conversion of life into explanatory myth, especially when applied retroactively to poetry. But the request was also naïve. Literary culture feeds on narrative, and silence is rarely respected.

Biographies appeared anyway. Memoirs followed. Anecdotes hardened into legend. Each promised access to the “real” Brodsky and produced, instead, another version. In opposing biography, he underestimated how quickly a writer loses control of his life once the work begins to matter.

Paradoxically, the accumulation of biographies may serve him better than silence would have. Multiple narratives blur the figure rather than sharpening it. What do we truly know about Goethe, or Shelley, or even the canonical poets of Russia’s Golden and Silver Ages? Excess of documentation erodes explanatory power. What remains is the work—resistant, autonomous, occasionally opaque. Brodsky, who believed poetry should outlive its maker, might have accepted this outcome, even if reluctantly.

Joseph Brodsky died just as the internet was beginning its rapid expansion, a timing with real consequences for his afterlife. He belonged to the last generation of major poets shaped primarily by print culture, lectures, and institutional recognition rather than digital circulation. His poems entered the world slowly—through books, photocopies, and yes, memorization. The internet would take everything to a new level, but he wouldn’t live to appreciate this way forward.

As a U.S. poet laureate, he once imagined leaving books of poetry in hotels and various public places so chance might create readers. The Internet has made such distribution trivial. Text is everywhere now, weightless and endless. And yet attention has shrunk rather than expanded.

Ubiquity does not produce reading. It often undermines it. Brodsky’s poems require slowness, silence, repetition—conditions increasingly scarce. The internet fulfilled his logistical fantasy while hollowing out its premise.

He once remarked that only one percent of humanity truly appreciates poetry. Thirty years later, that estimate may apply to prose as well. Long-form reading itself has become a minority practice. Brodsky’s work likely occupies an even smaller circle. But scarcity was never an argument against poetry.

3.

There is another reason the thirty-year mark matters, though it is slightly more subtle. It marks the point at which memory begins to thin out—not entirely, but unevenly. Those who encountered Brodsky as a living presence, whether in lectures, readings, or personal acquaintance, are gradually aging. Their recollections still circulate, but with diminishing authority. What replaces them is not oblivion but a different kind of knowledge: secondhand, textual, mediated.

This shift alters the way a poet is read. When a writer is still remembered as a person, interpretation remains tethered—sometimes excessively so—to temperament, gesture, voice. Once that tether loosens, the work acquires a harsher autonomy. Lines are no longer rescued by charisma; ideas are no longer softened by anecdote. What remains is language confronting language.

Brodsky was acutely aware of this process, even while alive. He understood that posterity is not a reward but a trial, and that survival depends less on being admired than on being reread under changing conditions. His suspicion of biography was not merely personal; it was structural. Biography fixes meaning prematurely. Poetry, by contrast, must endure misunderstanding, neglect, even hostility if it is to remain alive. Further, the danger is not that his poetry will become irrelevant, but that it will be domesticated—treated as a style rather than a stance, a difficulty rather than a demand.

What resists this domestication is his insistence on form as an ethical act. For Brodsky, meter was not ornament but discipline; syntax was not an expression, but an argument. In an era increasingly impatient with constraint, this aspect of his work may prove its most durable—and its most alienating. The poet does not flatter the reader’s experience. He assumes neither innocence nor redemption. Language, in his hands, does not console so much as insist.

There is also the question of translation, which has grown sharper with time. Brodsky famously translated himself into English, sometimes brutally, sometimes brilliantly. These versions were not replicas but attempts — about what could survive the crossing and what could not. Thirty years later, English-language readers increasingly encounter him first in translation, often unaware of how much was lost, displaced, or deliberately transformed. This is not a failure of access but a condition of it. Brodsky’s poetry was never meant to arrive intact. It arrives fractured, demanding reconstruction.

Perhaps this is why the present distance feels productive rather than mournful. Enough time has passed for reverence to weaken, but not enough for indifference to set in. The work stands exposed—less protected, more vulnerable, and therefore more readable. That may be the real justification for returning now, rather than earlier or later: not because the number is round, but because the focus has shifted.

4.

Akhmatova famously observed that the Soviet persecutions were shaping Brodsky’s biography. Biography, however, is no synonym for immortality. At best, it’s a preliminary condition.

He died at fifty-five—an age neither devastatingly young nor comfortably old. It suggests a life cut short but not truncated. One can imagine him alive today, navigating the anxieties of the 2020s, just as one might imagine Pushkin surviving into a later, duller imperial age of Alexander III, had history been less brutal.

Russian poets have a reputation for early death, though the twentieth century produced its share of long lives. Fifty-five sits awkwardly between mastery and exhaustion. Brodsky left behind not fragments, but an unfinished whole.

Speculating about what he would say today is both tempting and pointless. Would he write online? Would he retreat further into formality? Would he post his verse on Facebook? Thirty years is long enough for irony to harden into nostalgia. More likely, he would refuse the question altogether. He distrusted topicality and preferred the long view.

Three decades on, Brodsky no longer belongs to controversy or commemoration. He belongs to language—where he always insisted poets reside. What remains is not a lesson but a pressure point: on syntax, on memory, on moral seriousness. That pressure has not eased. If anything, it has grown more necessary.

January 2026

Photo at top: Joseph Brodsky at his desk in the Modern Language Building at the University of Michigan.

Carl Jung's reported last words were, "Let's have a really good red wine tonight."

It’s been 20 years since I published a profile of C.S. Lewis’s wife, “Lost in the Shadow of C.S. Lewis’ Fame: Joy Davidman was a Noted Poet, a Feisty Communist and a Free Spirit,” in The San Francisco Chronicle on January 1, 2006. It was a good thing to do, because at that point relatively little had been written about Joy Davidman’s life and achievements. I was sorry to see that the article had disappeared online, but was able to retrieve it from recesses of the worldwide web, thanks to Stanford Libraries.

Back in 2006, the story had a “news hook.” The season’s holiday blockbuster movie offering was The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It had reignited interest in C.S. Lewis – if it ever needed rekindling.

However, none of the publicity had created a spark of interest in his much-maligned wife, Helen Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis. Hence my article.

It’s too bad, for the comet of Joy Davidman’s life was arcing long before Jack Lewis intersected its path. Like so many women, however, her reputation was shaped by others: She has often been portrayed through stuffy British eyes as a pushy, middle-aged American divorcee with literary pretensions – the Yoko Ono of the 1950s, or another Wallis Simpson, perhaps. The popular 1993 movie “Shadowlands” made her famous mostly for dying. Debra Winger, as Davidman, gives Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins, a splendid opportunity to suffer.

But oh, she was so much more than that. It’s high time for America to reclaim Davidman as a poet and writer, as well as Lewis’ beloved, dying wife.

Most references to her either neglect or gloss over the fact that she received the most prestigious award a new poet can receive – the Yale Younger Poets Series Award – for her 1938 poetry collection, “Letter to a Comrade.” Sylvia Plath’s journal (the two women were sisters under the skin in a number of ways) shows that the younger American poet would have killed for the honor.

A year later, Davidman was named joint recipient – with Robert Frost – of the $1,000 Loines Memorial Fund. She went on to write two novels. Her final work, Smoke on the Mountain, is a vivid, provocative interpretation of the Decalogue still in print after half a century. She inspired what some critics see as Lewis’ greatest work, Till We Have Faces, as well as being its dedicatee (as he was hers in Smoke). Some say she is even the model for its tough and invincible heroine, Orual.

Davidman was a star almost from birth. The New Yorker, born into a family of Polish and Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in 1915, began reading before she was 3. At 8, she read H.G. Wells’ “Outline of History” and pronounced herself an atheist. She had a photographic memory; her kid brother recalls that she could read a page of Shakespeare once and have it memorized. Her IQ tests nearly broke the charts.

The brother, psychiatrist Howard Davidman, recounted an extraordinary story about her: The two enjoyed going to the Bronx Zoo and talking to the animals. The 14-year-old girl, however, hungered for a deeper rapport with the big cats. With her brother, they repeatedly broke into the zoo after nightfall. Davidman would coax the lions to the bars, talk to them, pet their heads and feed them from her hand. The nocturnal visits – prefiguring Aslan by years – continued for a long time without incident or detection.

Davidman entered Hunter College at 14, and took a degree at 19. A mere three semesters later, in 1935, she received her master’s degree with honors from Columbia University. She began publishing poetry in America’s most prestigious poetry magazine, Poetry, the next year.

Davidman’s firecracker momentum was interrupted a few weeks before her Hunter graduation, when she witnessed, outside her classroom window, an orphan plunge to her death from the roof of a nearby building. The despairing girl had been hungry for days during the depths of the Depression.

The suicide haunted Davidman for years, pushing her toward membership in the Communist Party, which she saw as a universal solvent for society’s ills. An acquaintance of the time recalls her as “almost a stereotype of the 1930s radical. She was aggressive, impatient and intolerant.”

Party membership coincided with the Yale publication of “Letter to a Comrade.” Pulitzer Prize-winning Stephen Vincent Benet, who selected the New Yorker for the honor, praised Davidman for her “varied command of forms and a bold power.” In his introduction, he wrote: “Miss Davidman is able to say things so they stick in the mind.” Here’s her poem, “Snow in Madrid,” written in 1937, when Spanish Civil War was fiercest:

Softly, so casual,
Lovely, so light, so light,
The cruel sky lets fall
Something one does not fight.

How tenderly to crown
The brutal year
The clouds send something down
That one need not fear.

Men before perishing
See with unwounded eye
For once a gentle thing
Fall from the sky.

Davidman was hardly the first woman who found her fame eclipsed by a husband’s. But, an overachiever in this as in everything, Davidman achieved that doubtful distinction twice. Long before C.S. Lewis entered the scene, she married William Gresham, a Spanish War veteran she met at a Communist Party gathering in 1942.

While Gresham is usually described as a “popular novelist,” the epithet fails to capture his contemporary notoriety. Gresham wrote the 1946 best-seller “Nightmare Alley” (dedicated to Davidman), a grotesque noir classic about the carnival demimonde, later made into an arresting film with Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. One reviewer described the book as a “tough, relentless, colorful novel that exposes the private world of the freaks in order to comment on a sick, degrading society.” In it, a two-bit carnival “spiritualist” swindles rich and credulous society matrons. Eventually, he faces his own collapse and disintegration.

Rather like Gresham himself. The Southern alcoholic was an abusive and chronically unfaithful husband worthy of the pages of O’Neill or Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. He fired rifles into the ceiling to relieve his tension and once broke a bottle on their son Douglas’ head.

One night in 1946, Gresham telephoned Davidman to tell her, incoherently, that he was having a nervous breakdown. Davidman waited at their upstate New York home after putting their two sons to bed, helpless and defeated for the first time in her life. This was the night she says “God came in”:

“There was a Person with me in that room, directly present to my consciousness – a Person so real that all my precious life was by comparison a mere shadow play. And I myself was more alive than I had ever been; it was like waking from sleep. So intense a life cannot be endured long by flesh and blood; we must ordinarily take our life watered down, diluted as it were, by time and space and matter. My perception of God lasted perhaps half a minute.”

Davidman’s conversion deepened the rift with Gresham, who had an increasing interest in Dianetics, the forerunner of Scientology, as well as dabbling attraction to tarot cards and the I Ching. After asking for domestic help from her cousin (who was seeking refuge from her own alcoholic husband in the Gresham home), Davidman made a pilgrimage to England for advice from her post-conversion mentor and pen pal, C.S. Lewis.

The English visit was a success; the arrangements back home a crisis. Gresham launched an affair with Davidman’s cousin. Gresham wanted divorce; Davidman wanted reconciliation: “Bill greeted me by knocking me about a bit. ... Two days after he’d half choked me, he asked in all seriousness, ‘Have you ever known me to do a brutal or unkind thing?’ “

Her 1953 emigration to England has usually been attributed to her breakup with Gresham and her subsequent flight into the arms of a stable, stoutish Oxford don. No one has suggested another possibility: The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings were in full swing.

Davidman had been a strident associate editor of New Masses and active in the pro-communist League of American Writers. She had also had an unsuccessful stint in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. Did she see herself and Gresham summoned to squeal on former colleagues before Sen. Joe McCarthy? At the time of her first flight to England in 1952, Congress was issuing subpoenas to another volatile husband-and-wife writer team with Hollywood links, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman. (Hammett served five months in jail for refusing to testify before McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee; Hellman was hauled before HUAC.)

This anxiety is not likely to surface in any of her letters, and could not have been discussed openly. Such were the times. It’s hard now to comprehend the red scare unleashed by the hearings, especially among those who might have had a song to sing. (As the daughter of a “red diaper baby,” this writer remembers being earnestly warned never to mention that grandparents had been rank-and-file Party members in the ‘30s – even a decade and a half after the congressional hearings finished.)

The British weren’t much easier than McCarthy. According to A.N. Wilson’s influential biography, Lewis’ Oxford friends found her “foul-mouthed, bad-tempered and self-assertive” – an argumentative wet blanket on the Inkling gatherings. Undoubtedly, they had not seen her likes before, but Davidman was at once totally original and a distinct American type: an abrasive, brilliant New York Jewish intellectual – a blazing Technicolor movie against the dowdy black-and-white reality of postwar Oxford. She was no more digestible to the British than, a few years later, the tall, blond Smith College graduate who burst upon the London literati with her can-do optimism, New England ambition and matching Samsonite luggage. England reacted to both Plath and Davidman with stinging resentment.

But Lewis adored her. And the rest is Shadowlands. His brother, Maj. Warren Lewis, wrote: “For Jack the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met ... who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and a sense of fun.” Warren Lewis came to regard her as a sister, and the three lived together in apparent harmony.

After Davidman’s death from cancer in 1960, Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed: “She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. ... If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less always been together, and created a scandal.”

Davidman’s death was followed by her husbands’: In 1962, Gresham, diagnosed with cancer of the tongue, killed himself in a seedy New York hotel room. He had registered under the name “Asa Kimball, of Baltimore.” Only The New York Times bridge columnist wrote a tribute to him. Lewis died on Nov. 22, 1963, his obituary obscured by the avalanche of coverage of a more famous “Jack,” gunned down in Dallas the same day.

Davidman was a powerful writer, but not an immortal one. What’s in her life and writing for us, nearly 50 years after her death? Perhaps a message about late-life reinvention, an epistle of encouragement to pick up and start over after spectacular failure and suffering, and a caution about the oddities of public fame. And the oddities of human fate.

Significantly, in the new Narnia film, the opening credits show the name “Douglas Gresham” as co-producer. Lewis died childless, as did his brother. Davidman’s younger son, who had adored his stepfather, became the torchbearer for the Lewis legacy. So far, it’s the only whiff of Joy in the current Lewis marketing mania.

Virginia Woolf thought about life differently. She believed it isn’t made up only of events or achievements, but of brief “moments of being” that don’t announce themselves—flashes of awareness that shimmer and vanish, yet leave a trace. A sentence that names a feeling not quite articulated before. An insight that unsettles what once seemed settled. A question that stays alive days or even weeks later. These moments don’t arrive labeled as hope, but they change how we see.

Public life increasingly runs in the opposite direction. It is shaped less by what people hope to build together than by who they are against: red versus blue, “real America” versus its enemies, every election a last stand, every defeat a betrayal. Nothing is allowed to settle. The fight must always go on, because without the fight, there is nothing left to hold.

We see this whenever leaders keep conflict alive by pointing outward—toward a villain abroad (the latest, Venezuela’s Maduro), a traitor within, or a threat just vague enough to absorb blame. The names change. The effect doesn’t.

René Girard identified the pattern. When enemies are required to define who we are, common purpose becomes common hatred. Imitated desires ensure rivalry, and relief is found by assigning blame. Sometimes the target is a group—“godless liberals,” Trump supporters. Sometimes it is an abstraction that cannot answer back: the economy. In each case, a scapegoat absorbs the disorder, creating unity not through truth but through exclusion. Politics knows this rhythm well.

Friedrich Nietzsche named a similar dynamic ressentiment. Blame supplies meaning. Frustration no longer seeks remedy; it seeks an offender. “I am right” is no longer enough—it must become “you are wrong.” Morality becomes adversity. The weakness politics fears is renamed vulnerability in personal relationships—and treated as moral capital.

We see this logic at work in ordinary places: a school board meeting where every proposal sounds like an attack; a neighborhood forum that turns into a trial; an online exchange where no concession counts, only the next offense. Solving the problem matters less than naming the culprit. Even victories feel thin—each one merely reveals the next foe—until resolution itself begins to look suspect, or even a letdown.

Rivalry demands a victim, and ressentiment a target. Hostility becomes the point. Identity forms around opposition, and when one grievance fades, another takes its place. Without an enemy, the story collapses.

Earlier struggles for justice, however flawed, aimed at ends that could at least be named and settled: a law changed, a right secured, a barrier removed. Now facts, compromises, and even concessions rarely curb anger, because politics feeds on grievance rather than resolution.

The roots are as much psychological as political. Nietzsche saw how suffering that cannot be acted upon becomes someone else’s fault. Hurt hardens into judgment; disappointment turns into injustice. It can feel easier to be wronged than responsible. We imitate one another’s desires and then turn on one another when those desires collide. Small differences are exaggerated to keep opposition alive.

Democracy has to offer other sources of commitment—ones that do not depend on having an enemy. People need things worth showing up for together: work worth doing, care given and received, shared projects that draw energy from devotion rather than grievance.

For us, that may begin—or begin again—modestly: staying at the table when it would be easier to walk away and feel justified. Doing the unglamorous work of keeping a school, a neighborhood, a church, a union, or a family from coming apart, even when no victory can be claimed and no one notices.

It is tempting to think moral seriousness must announce itself as a crisis. Moral life begins sooner than that. It is practiced without spectacle, sustained in situations with no spotlight and no applause: taking out the trash for an elderly neighbor, watching a friend’s kids, fixing a loose step, shoveling a driveway before work—the low hum of ordinary care.

These “moments of being” belong to no side. They offer no scapegoat, no enemy to drive out. There is nothing glamorous about them—only the steady practice of showing up.

The world does not move only through power or headlines. Sometimes it moves through memory, attention, and ordinary acts that never become slogans. The full circle isn’t flashy. It holds.

Notes and reading

• Venezuela - Maduro abducted. The familiar patterns discussed in this post apply: mimetic rivalry, ressentiment, and scapegoating.
  
  Sunday morning: While a U.S. citizen, I grew up in Venezuela, which became my home country—alma mia. The Hugo Chávez > Nicolás Maduro regime has been brutal and corrupt. So was the right-wing dictatorship that Venezuelans themselves had overthrown in 1958, to the dismay of the U.S., which had been receiving 90% of national oil revenues from the American oil companies that effectively owned the oil fields and have since been nationalized under incompetent management.
  
  What followed the earlier dictator’s demise was an attempt at democracy that descended into chaos: the very dynamic that had enabled authoritarianism to return under a different banner then inspired the rise of the left-wing regime just overthrown.

  
  Apparently, the U.S. president expects to “run the country” with the (former) dictator’s loyal Vice-President, not the Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition leader, María Machado, whose electoral victory had been denied by Maduro and called “rigged.” The U.S. itself backed the extraction of Machado in December 2025, just four weeks ago, even though she had become a vocal supporter of our own president.
  — One response to Donald Trump could be, “Been there. Done that. It doesn’t work.”

Media commentary is now overwhelming. Among the strongest are Timothy Snyder, an American historian of Europe and a public intellectual in both the United States and Europe, and Joyce Vance, a former U.S. Attorney.

The figure of the scapegoat extends beyond its biblical origins in Leviticus to many religious and cultural rituals of expulsion intended to contain disorder and restore unity. Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Freud’s Totem and Taboo remain classic studies of how pollution, exclusion, violence, and belonging intertwine in human communities. Earlier cultures marked the New Year by naming and containing scapegoating; we mark it by denying it—while practicing it endlessly.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (1989). First Essay, §§10–11.

René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (1977), esp. chs. 2–4; and The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (1986).

“low-humming rhythm of simplicity”—Rituparna Sengupta, “Each Leaf a Second,” World Literature Today (January/February 2026). Sengupta researches and writes on literature, cinema, and popular culture. O. P. Jindal Global University, India.

Moral progress is annoying - Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra, Aeon (June 2024). Affective friction: the misalignment between our internalized norm psychology and new or unfamiliar social norms. Kelly and Westra are philosophers at Purdue University who work on issues in moral and cognitive science. (Compare “cognitive dissonance”)

[Virginia Woolf—The phrase “moments of being” comes from her autobiographical writings. See Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1976).]

More from the remarkable William C. Green:

Christmas, after all

Room for Love

About 2 + 2 = 5

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Winter is a great time for reading. Here’s our suggestion for 2026. Our next “Another Look” event at Stanford will feature a Nobel prizewinner. You won’t want to miss it.

On Wednesday, 18 February, 2026, Another Look will present Nobel prizewinning Patrick Modiano’s 2007 novella, In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books, translated by Chris Clarke). The event will take place, as always, at 7 p.m. at Levinthal Hall, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus.

Panelists will include Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts.

They will be joined by Chloe Edmondson, a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of French and Italian. She is the France-Stanford Center Fellow for the Roxane Debuisson Collection on Paris History. You will remember her from our event Madame de LaFayette’s The Princesse de Clèves in 2019. Stanford actor, director, and drama professor and Rush Rehm to round out the panel. (You will remember Rush from our 2016 event on Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line: A Confession.)

The Nobel announcement recognized Modiano’s “consistent exploration of memory and the elusive nature of personal history, often set against the backdrop of occupied Paris.”

He was praised for his “subtle, clear style and his ability to bring anonymous lives to light, making him a modern-day Proust in the eyes of some.”

Come join us on February 18. Sign up on the link below:

https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-03yUMbsSWWwJdijPIQg3w

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Anne Stevenson in Wales. (Photo: Carrie Hitchcock)

Anne Stevenson is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, including Granny Scarecrow, The Collected Poems, 1955-1995, Four and a Half Dancing Men, and Correspondences. She is the author of several volumes of literary criticism as well, and also of the controversial Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Stevenson was writer-in-residence at the University of Dundee, 1973-75, a fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1975-77, and writer-in-residence at Bulmershe College, Reading, Berkshire, 1977-78, and the University of Edinburgh, 1987-89. She was also a Northern Arts Literary Fellow at Newcastle and Durham, 1981-82 and 1984-85. She died in 2020.

I had known her for many years, and spent a week at the 17th century home in Llanbedr, rural Wales, in 2009. She lived there with her husband, Peter Lucas. I wrote about the visit here. She was an alumna, as I am, of the University of Michigan. But we met in Durham, where I visited her beautiful flat near the Norman-era citadel and cathedral on the River Wear. Later, I published a long Q&A with her over at the Cortland Review. I include it below:

Anne Stevenson is a decidedly British-American phenomenon: she was born in Cambridge, England; reared in the States; and educated at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The U.S. citizen returned to Britain after her bachelor’s and master’s degrees (she studied with Donald Hall) and has lived, variously, in England, Scotland, and Wales in the decades since. She is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as additional books of essays and literary criticism.

The Washington Post praised the “penetrating, skeptical intelligence” of her poetry. Peter Levi, in Britain’s Poetry Review, described her “terse brilliance,” “moral wit,” and “hard-bitten objectivity.... The stinging winter sunshine in her poems is what we need and seldom find elsewhere,” Levi wrote.

We met earlier this year in her home in the amazing, breathtaking city of Durham, England. Its gray Norman citadel rises massively, magnificently out of an outcropping of rock and green hill, blending castle and university and cathedral into a single silhouette with the rushing Wear River at its base. This town near the Scottish border has been the poet’s home for over a decade.

For me, the visit amounted to a pilgrimage. The name “Anne Stevenson” has been a familiar one ever since my own university days in Ann Arbor: Stevenson serves as a sort of patron saint for literature students at the university, just as Arthur Miller had done at the drama department. Moreover, both of us had won Avery Hopwood awards while at the university, although Stevenson’s three awards (’51, ‘52, and ‘54) were rather an astonishment. By comparison, Arthur Miller and I were only awarded twice.

Stevenson won praise from another alumna—The New Yorker‘s Janet Malcolm, author of Silent Woman, the highly acclaimed study of scholarship about Plath. In that book, Malcolm lauded Stevenson as the author of Bitter Fame, the controversial Plath biography.

Despite the accolades (Malcolm had said Stevenson’s was “by far the most intelligent and the only authentically satisfying” Plath biography), the book won her scores of enemies and tended to put her own acclaimed poetry in eclipse. A dozen years since the book’s publication, Stevenson seems to take her own bitter fame in stride.

Our interview, conducted at her home—in the small, tidy parlor, which is dominated by a big shiny piano, fresh flowers, and a kilim carpet—was not without difficulty. She had just returned from an overnight stay in the Lake Country at Grassmere, where she gave a reading the night before at the Wordsworth Museum—in fact, she hadn’t even had time to change clothes.

More importantly, the poet has grown mostly deaf over the past years, a handicap she comments upon wryly in a recent quatrain:

I’ve lost a sense. Why should I care?
Searching myself, I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair
And set it deftly, like a snare.

Nevertheless, Stevenson lived up to her feisty reputation. As fellow transatlantic poet Alastair Reid noted, “She has a whim of iron.”

—Cynthia Haven

Interview with Anne Stevenson

Cynthia Haven: You’ve had a long career—your first book was published way back in 1965, under the auspices of Generation at the University of Michigan. How do you think you’ve changed as a poet since then?

Anne Stevenson: I suppose, over the years, I’ve become more conscious of what I can and what I can’t do in poetry. And I hope I’ve learned not to think of myself as the center of the universe. It’s apparently very hard for people to swallow that they aren’t all that important. Don’t you think it’s better to open one’s eyes to the objective world than to become a slave of ambition and desire? But I’m not very good at saying such things in interviews. If I could, maybe I wouldn’t have to write poetry.

CH: Could you describe your daily schedule?

AS: Practically nonexistent. I used to do a great many readings and arts councilings and that sort of thing. But my husband prefers a quiet life, and I myself have found that for writing, I’m better off not scooting around too much. As a consequence, my new book, at least in my opinion, is one of my best.

CH: Your new book was published in Britain?

AS: Granny Scarecrow came out last May. It’s published by Bloodaxe Books. Oxford stopped publishing poetry at the end of last year. Bloodaxe is, fortunately for me, based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, just a few miles from my home in Durham. [Ed. Note: Bloodaxe is one of the preeminent British publishers of poetry.]

CH: You attended the West Chester Poetry Conference this summer. Was that the first time you participated in a U.S. poetry conference since your move to Britain decades ago?

AS: Yes, and I had pretty cold feet about going.

CH: Why?

AS: Partly because I’m seriously deaf. But I went in company with a good young English poet, Chris McCulley. It was a deal. I was supposed to keep him from drinking alcohol. He was supposed to do my hearing for me. [Stevenson laughs]

CH: So you haven’t been back much to the U.S. as a poet?

AS: Well, I gave a few readings early in June—two in Wisconsin, one in Ann Arbor, and then took part in one in West Chester. I don’t much like traveling around giving readings. I sometimes wonder what people get out of listening once to poems they don’t know. Even when my hearing was better, I know I missed most of what was read on such occasions. I admit I do quite enjoy “treading the boards” if the audience is sympathetic and small enough.

CH: What did you speak about at West Chester?

AS: In my “master class” I tried essentially to make a distinction between rhythm and meter. The former is a physical-cum-musical concept; the latter has to do with prosodic forms. People forget that memorable rhythms are not always metrically exact. Mainly I used examples from poems that I thought would be familiar to the students: poems from Shakespeare, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, and most of all from G.M. Hopkins, whose ideas about sprung rhythm can be shown to apply almost universally. I also drew attention to Ivor Gurney’s experiments with form and rhythm, and to the elegant free verse of my friend Frances Horovitz, who, alas, died of cancer at forty in 1983. And, yes, I quoted nursery rhymes and pop songs. It’s surprising how much so-called traditional poetry is not metrically exact—especially if you count stresses per line instead of feet. Once you know what a foot is in a line of poetry, it’s good to get away from the straightjacket of over-strict meters. Poetry has to either sing or talk—almost naturally. Otherwise, it gets boring.

CH: Yet you’ve written much verse in very traditional meters…

AS: Well, I suspect there isn’t really such a thing as free verse. Or if there is, I don’t think I’ve written any. Readers may not always realize how formally constructed my poems are—but I assure you, not a single line has ever been passed over as accidental or unconsidered. Let me show you a poem that illustrates what I mean.

[Stevenson reads her poem: “Trinity at Low Tide”]

Sole to sole with your reflection
on the glassy beach,
your shadow gliding beside you,
you stride in triplicate across the sand.
Waves, withdrawn to limits on their leash,
are distant, repetitious whisperings,
while doubling you, the rippling tideland
deepens you.

Under you, transparent yet exact,
your downward ghost keeps pace-
pure image, cleansed of human overtones:
a travelling sun, your face;
your breast, a field of sparkling shells and stones.
All blame is packed into that black, featureless
third trick of light that copies you
and cancels you.

As you must have heard, there are a great many assonantal sounds there: beach, leach, repetitious—obviously echoing words or echoing noises. “Repetitious whispering” is onomatopoeic. “Doubling you” and “deepens you” are chiming, rhythmic phrases. Since there are eight lines in the first stanza, all of different lengths, the second stanza has to repeat or reflect the same number. The poem is, among other things, about reflections. Then the “you... you...you” noises are important as are the repeated “c’s”: cleansed, copies, cancels, and the rhyming of pace and face. The effect is of rhymes running all through the poem’s wave-like rhythms. I wanted them to reproduce the sound of water lapping against the shore.

CH: It also conveys what one critic called your “nervous echo, the insistent double, the recollecting mirror.” He said: “this doubling develops into something between a persistent motif and a personal signature.” But it’s interesting you use terms like “echoing” and “chiming” where many would use “internal rhyme,” or “alliteration.”

AS: I rarely think of terms like alliteration, internal rhyme, et cetera. Either a poem sings or it doesn’t. I am conscious of the line endings, yes, but I never analyze what is happening when I write. That comes later. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, it’s too easy to talk the life out of poetry. My model is, anyway, music: that is, poems come to me in musical phrases or cadences. Some of my poems are probably just musical toys.

CH: So how do you begin a poem? How does a poem come to you?

AS: Sometimes a line just appears, but most of the time I see something or hear about something, or even read something that makes me sit up and say, “I’m sure there’s a poem there.” Once I’ve drafted a first stanza—the one, say, in the poem I just read—I usually decide to carry through the pattern it sets up. I don’t know how long the poem’s going to be, of course. Sometimes I don’t even know what the poem is going to be about. But by the time I’ve worked my way around a few drafts—it usually takes me, oh, I would say twelve to fifteen drafts to write a short poem like “Trinity at Low Tide”—and by the time I’ve found a rhythm that seems right, and I’ve got an idea running smoothly through it, then the poem sort of comes together of its own accord. The process is not unlike solving a crossword puzzle. No, not really the same, because most of what happens is unconscious, and most of the time you work on a poem—say, for a couple of days, very hard—getting nowhere with it, or losing the thread completely...and then, you wake up one morning and the whole thing works!

So writing a poem is like conducting an argument between your unconscious mind and your conscious self. You have to get unconsciousness and consciousness lined up in some way. I suspect that’s why working to a form, achieving a stanza, and keeping to it—deciding that the first and third and fifth lines will have to rhyme, and that you’re going to insist on so many stresses per line—oddly helps the poem to be born. That is, to free itself from you and your attentions to it and become a piece of art in itself. Heaven only knows where it comes from! I suppose working out a form diminishes the thousands of possibilities you face when you begin. And once you’ve cut down the possibilities, you can’t swim off into the deep and drown. Well, it’s a very, very strange process.

CH: How did you begin writing poetry?

AS: I suppose my father read lots of it to us. And I have always loved ballads and songs. Those are what I wrote as a child, you know—ballads and songs. I knew a great many by heart, though I couldn’t recite them now. And when I got to high school, I had very good English teaching, and I spent my summers writing poems and practicing the piano and cello. At the time, I wanted to be a musician. My father was a good amateur pianist.

CH: And you began as a musician, didn’t you?

AS: Well, in my teens and for two years at Michigan, I studied the piano and the cello, but I was never very good. My hearing is so bad now I don’t try to play the cello, but I can still hear enough to enjoy my piano. Music and poetry developed together for me, and despite my deafness, I still believe that music is the finest of the arts.

But maybe something else goes into making a poet: you could call it a resistant discontent with the given thing. I’ve never been a quick learner, and in grade school my teachers thought I was slow, even stupid. One problem may have been, even then, unreliable hearing. And not being able to hear may have made me the kind of person who has to think about everything hard before taking it onboard. Being slow to understand can be an advantage, and perhaps I learned at an early age how to make the baffling world make sense.

CH: Music is very much evident in your poetry—in its composition and sounds, even its subject matter. I am particularly fond of “Kosovo Surprised by Mozart” which appeared in Britain’s PN Review earlier this year and later in Granny Scarecrow. Can you describe its origins?

AS: “Kosovo Surprised by Mozart” was written, as the title indicates, in April, 1999, the day after I had listened to Bernard Roberts in Harlech play K 533 in F Major. Roberts gave a series of recitals that spring centered on classical—18th, early-19th century—piano music at a time when the horrors of Serbia’s invasion of Kosovo were, in Britain, nightly “entertainment” on the television. The elegance of Mozart’s music has always struck me as a true artist’s response to squalor, evil, and human folly. One doesn’t wallow in violence and cruelty, one rises above it! Very unfashionable point of view today but, nevertheless, mine. Out of Mozart’s short, sad, in many ways squalid life, arose all that magnificent music; it survives still, bringing to those who can hear it great joy today, though Mozart the man was buried more than 200 years ago in a pauper’s grave.

The horrors of Kosovo on the television were symptomatic of humanity’s willingness to inflict, record, and accept misery. It’s easier to wallow in a cinematic hell—there before you on the screen at the flick of a switch—than to listen and understand the passionate compassion Mozart imparts through those “inky dots,” but, really, nothing is more boring than sustained violence, nothing more degrading to the spirit, which is why, to a few, Mozart’s music is like a redemption, despite the continuing defeat of the beautiful and good in a world, past and present, of terrible yet ephemeral events.

The theme of “Kosovo Surprised by Mozart” is that of “The Miracle of Camp 60”—a poem about the chapel built by Italian prisoners of war in Orkney during World War II. Art of any kind, if it really is art, moves us towards sympathy, understanding, and a release of the spirit, just as Aristotle taught in the 4th century B.C., and as W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens, with their very different beliefs, taught in the 20th century A.D.

CH: The Dictionary of Literary Biography said you have “a fine sense of the complicated differences between American and British poetry, and [embody] the traditions of both in a poetry that achieves definition because of its allegiances, and distinction because of its intense and relentless individuality.”

AS: Who said that?

CH: J.E. Chamberlin of the University of Toronto.

AS: Indeed. Well, that’s quite good—a bit academic.

CH: How do you combine those sensibilities? And how do you see the differences?

AS: That’s not for me to say. That’s for somebody else. I think I’m vain enough to believe that if anyone took time to study my poetry, they might find quite a number of things to say about...well, the kind of things I say.

CH: Do you see an affinity between your native Michigan and the north of England where you live now?

AS: Probably. The south of England, Oxford and Cambridge, are a bit like Harvard and Yale, aren’t they? That ever-present, coolly assumed superiority. I’m sure I’d rather live in an environment where there aren’t quite so many tropical fish, as it were, crowding the fishbowl, mostly bent on eating each other. I don’t thrive in a community of egos. Not at all. I feel the Midwestern part of me is the healthiest part—you know, feet on the ground, common sense. But I need a lot of space, too, in which to think. I need to read a lot. I don’t just mean reading poetry, but reading novels and books on science and history, lots of biography. I wonder how poets ever have time to read enough when they’re flying all over the world giving readings.

CH: It’s good to have time for mulling.

AS: Mulling, yes. You have to mull a lot. You have to be in touch with yourself, with your deeper self, to write poetry. Having to project yourself, as I do at readings, cheats me from being in touch with the self that writes the poems. There’s one of me that’s a “projector”—an actress, if you like—but the me that writes poems is a more difficult person. If I give too many readings, or even see too many people, I find myself behaving in ways that I fancy might please them. Afterwards, I feel rather dirty and nasty, as if I’d betrayed somebody behind her back.

CH: Maybe that’s what ate Sylvia Plath.

AS: Sylvia Plath felt the same. I know she did.

Her journals analyze her social discomforts again and again. It’s clear she found people exhausting, but she needed to impress them, too. Then, when she got to Devon and there weren’t any people she much cared to impress, she became depressed and miserable. I don’t think that’s so surprising, mind you. Probably for Plath, as for me, poetry was the only language through which she could approach her emotional truth. Alas, the truths in her case were so devastating they killed her.

CH: Did you know Jane Kenyon? Of course you must have. She grew up in Ann Arbor, too.

AS: I knew who she was.

CH: But she was married to Donald Hall. Didn’t your paths cross?

AS: Donald Hall was married to somebody else when I was in Ann Arbor. Jane was a little younger than I was.

CH: Tell me a little bit about your connection with Donald Hall. He encouraged you to write your first book about Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop (Twayne, 1966).

AS: Yes. He introduced me to poetry, really. I owe Donald Hall a great deal. I took his course in contemporary American poets. He was intelligent, inspiring, a fine teacher.

CH: At the University of Michigan?

AS: Yes. I was a graduate student. It must have been 1960, 1961.

CH: One thing Sylvia Plath, you, and I have in common is that we all left university, moved to England, and married Englishmen.

AS: There’s lots else we have in common. [Stevenson chuckles.]

CH: Yes. But of the three of us, I was the only one who went back. Why did you first move to England?

AS: I was born in England. I was born in Cambridge.

CH: I thought you were born in Ann Arbor.

AS: No. I was born in Cambridge, England, where my father [Charles Leslie Stevenson] went to study philosophy with [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore, among others, after he’d taken a first degree at Yale. I was born in Cambridge, in January, 1933. That’s why I was in such a hurry to get back to Cambridge after I’d graduated from Michigan.

CH: And your first husband was from Cambridge, yes?

AS: During the war, my family adopted two English girls from Cambridge as part of an Anglo-American university scheme to send the children of English dons to the States—to escape the bombing and the Nazis’ very possible invasion. Robin, my first husband, was the younger brother of these girls. He must have been nine at the time (I was seven), and he lived with a banker’s family just up the street. Much later, when we were both at university—he was at Cambridge and I was a senior at Michigan—we met again one summer and decided it would be nice to seal the family bond. So I came to England, actually, to marry Robin Hitchcock. The marriage was not a great success, but we have an awfully nice daughter and two lovely grandchildren to share between us. We’re still on good terms.

Robin was utterly unlike Ted Hughes; they had almost nothing in common, but there was a curious connection. Robin was the son of the Queen’s College rector who had died during the war. His widow, through the kindness of the new incumbent, was invited to stay on in the rectory and support herself by taking in lodgers. Ted Hughes’s best friend, Lucas Myers, happened to be one of the lodgers. Luke tells the story of Ted’s nights in the St. Botolph’s chicken coop in his appendix to Bitter Fame, but even though Ted was around now and again, I never met Sylvia Plath. We were nearly the same age, but by 1955, the year Sylvia came to study at Cambridge, I was already married and living in London.

CH: Why do you think people are still fascinated by the Plath legend? With the release of the unabridged journals this year, we can see it is still pretty much a national obsession—still, after forty years, on both sides of the ocean.

AS: Don’t ask me. Maybe because everybody loves a romance. Why do they still get excited about the woes of Tristan and Isolde? The Hughes-Plath story is another desperately tragic tale. It will probably never disappear from 20th-century mythology.

CH: In a recent San Jose Mercury article, I argued that the frenzy seems to arise from very different national ideologies, and very divergent attitudes about personal responsibility, psychological health, and human relationships.

AS: You think so?

CH: Coarsely put, the English attitude seems to be that Plath needed to take responsibility for pulling herself together and be “a good wife.”

AS: Well, she was a good wife. Maybe too good. Oh, it’s very complicated. I think I’ve told the story as well as I can in Bitter Fame. Put coarsely, Sylvia was completely unable to accept failure. If her marriage failed—that was it, forever.

I’ve read an interesting article recently by a psychiatrist who puts a great deal of responsibility on the shoulders of Ruth Beuscher, Sylvia’s therapist. Ruth Beuscher, who later became a pastoral psychologist in the Church, was young and inexperienced when Plath first met her. It was Beuscher who persuaded Sylvia to have electrical shock treatment the second time, and, of course, that shock treatment became a central trauma to Sylvia later on. In Boston, Beuscher gave Sylvia “permission to hate” her mother—rather extreme, don’t you think, to give an impressionable girl permission to “hate” her mother, even though this particular mother, by doing right may actually have perpetrated wrong? A more mature psychiatrist would have realized that the hatred of a mother and the love of the father aren’t so simple as the Electra complex formula would have them be. Sylvia clearly took everything Ruth Beuscher told her to heart. Finally, when Ted Hughes was having an affair, and Sylvia got wind of it in Devon—it wasn’t much of an affair; I don’t excuse Ted, but you can see why he might have made a bid for liberty just then—it was Beuscher again who advised her to break with Ted immediately. Don’t try to patch it up, Beuscher almost ordered. She’d been through a divorce experience herself, and she knew that, once caught straying, a husband could never be trusted to be faithful again, so Sylvia set up on her own.

CH: You’re taking a very English point of view. You patch things up. You make do.

AS: No. I’m not taking an English point of view. Heavens, I’ve been through three divorces, but I do think what you need when a marriage is going wrong is a trial separation. You don’t just jump into divorce right away. If you’re a psychiatrist advising someone, you try to help them put it together, especially since it was such a close marriage, a marriage of two souls—two children to think of, too. No, I don’t think mine is an English point of view. It’s just common sense.

CH: Yes. The English are very big on common sense.

AS: Well, maybe. But whatever it was, it was an unhappy situation for Sylvia.

CH: American thinking is much more final, much more all-or-nothing. He broke a commitment, a bond—that’s the beginning and end of it.

AS: Yes. They divorce at the drop of a hat.

CH: Exactly.

AS: [Laughter]

CH: It’s funny—I can describe the points of view on both sides of the Atlantic, but I feel like I’m somehow welded into one side of the debate; it’s part of my hardware. I wonder if the ferocity and rancor of the debate is because Sylvia Plath is so American.

AS: She was American.

CH: Her ambition, her drive, her determination to have everything perfect—it’s so Emersonian.

AS: Yes, yes, yes.

CH: She’s the daughter of America—she’s Daisy Miller.

AS: Yes, yes, yes.

CH: So when we see her go down—all of us are going down, with her.

AS: But I will say this about Sylvia Plath: she always tucked that pocket of air between herself and her poems. Her poems are powerful because she was essentially an artist before she was a woman or an American or anything else. When she wrote, she had this wonderful hard-headed objectivity. It was when she wasn’t writing that she betrayed herself. But we can agree with Olwyn Hughes [Ted’s sister and Plath’s longtime literary executor] that as an artist, she’s unassailable. That’s why her poems are so powerful; they are much more, very much more, than self-expression. They express the agony of betrayal as well as any poems I’ve ever read. They are wonderful, but the gap between the girl and the artist was enormous. To me, her talent was so much bigger than her personality, it must have been very difficult to carry all this power of language and yet, in the end, realize it couldn’t save her.

CH: In a sense, what was American in her destroyed her.

AS: Yes, destroyed her. Yes. Her ambition destroyed her, in a way.

CH: That New England perfectionism.

AS: Yes. I remember that. Once, at Michigan, I got a “D” in a history exam and was nearly on the point of dropping out of college altogether. You would have thought the world had come to an end.

Perhaps one reason I agreed to write Bitter Fame had to do with Sylvia’s Americanness. I felt I knew her in a way Ted didn’t. So when Olwyn Hughes began bitching about Sylvia, telling me how absurd she was and how she expected Ted to do this and expected Ted to do that and completely ruled the household, I said, “That’s just the way Americans are.” [Laughter.]

Well, possibly, England was a disease Sylvia suffered from. I did, too, but I was more cowed by it. And then I got out of one English marriage and went straight into another! I suppose over the years I’ve learned to take myself less seriously. Surely, part of the skill of survival is to laugh at yourself, to realize you’ve made mistakes, that everybody makes mistakes. What the Hell!

CH: Certainly your book was colored by the tone of its appendices. Dido Merwin’s is so venomous…

AS: Yes.

CH: And Lucas Myers’ is so anti-American.

AS: No, I don’t think he was, really.

CH: Oh, he says some pretty offensive things.

AS: Yes, maybe he was trying to be more English than the English.

CH: T.S. Eliot had already won that prize. But I think those accounts gave Bitter Fame a flavor. It gave an inevitability to Sylvia Plath’s story—she does seem a sort of Daisy Miller through it all. Even Hughes’s Birthday Letters reveals a remarkable amount of national stereotyping: “You were a new world. My new world. So this is America,” “long, perfect American legs,” “your exaggerated American grin,” “an American girl, being so American.” One wonders: Did he see her?

AS: Of course, he wasn’t in any way a stereotype of southern England. He was very, very much a product of Yorkshire, and that’s another complication. I’ve always had the highest respect for Ted as a poet and a man because he never kowtowed to the establishment. He didn’t become an academic; he wasn’t ambitious, except to write poetry; he wasn’t ambitious for position. I think he was pleased to be asked to be poet laureate, but he wasn’t working at it. He certainly didn’t work at literary politics at all; he had nothing to do with that; he was horrified by it. And I’d have to say Sylvia, too, was of a mind with Ted. They both were dedicated—seriously dedicated—artists, but, of course, their very dedication and their lack of self-knowledge... I don’t think Ted knew himself at all in those early days, and Sylvia seems to have absorbed advice from everybody: from Ted, from Ruth Beuscher as a young child, from her mother, so it was awfully hard for her to find herself, and I think she did have a—how do you put it now? A weak sense of identity? I did, too, when I came to England. So you go to everybody for advice and take it from everybody you respect, and then they betray you. How very Henry James. It is Henry James. It struck me right away that Sylvia’s was a Jamesian story.

CH: You wrote three poems for Sylvia Plath. Were they written at the time you were writing the biography?

AS: Yes. Yes.

CH: So those poems are your own say?

AS: That was my own say. I think they more or less say what I had to say.

CH: They’re wonderful.

AS: Hmmm?

CH: I think they’re marvelous.

AS: You do? I’m glad. I thought at West Chester, maybe, I should read the long one. I didn’t, finally.

CH: The one where you call Plath “the pure gold honey bee” and “the fiercest poet of our time”? That’s too bad!

AS: I don’t know. Oh dear, every time I think about Sylvia Plath I groan. I’m so tired of the whole saga!

CH: I’ll bet you are. It will all be coming out again with the new journals, the revelations from Emory University [where Hughes’s papers are archived], and with the biographies of Ted Hughes, by Elaine Feinstein and Diane Middlebrook.

AS: They’re welcome to do what they do. I’ll never write another biography about a living person.

CH: And yet, you yourself have written: “Writing a biography of Sylvia Plath convinced me that poetry today is at a turning point. Nostalgic wistfulness, individual self-pity, political idealism, angst, fury, vindictiveness, all the emotional magnets of the Romantics, are, in the last analysis, fictions. They have been replaced in poetry, in the twentieth century, chiefly by abstract experiment with language, which, of course, is starvation fare for poets.” So where is the balance between subjectivity and objectivity?

AS: One has to maintain a distance, an air pocket between the poet and the poem—a pocket of objectivity. The poem isn’t an expression of what you could say better in ordinary language, or in theoretical language.

CH: Do you think the imbalance has resulted in too little technique—too much self-expression—in poetry?

AS: That’s right.

CH: In your rather crusty on-line response to Poetry Society of America’s “What’s American About American Poetry?”—a questionnaire sent to 300 American poets—you said there was “Too much talk, too much hype, too much putative democracy, too much ignorance, too much self-indulgence, too much encouragement, too much follow-the-leader conformism, too much self-consciousness, too much seek-to-establish-your-identity, too much theory of language, too much academic anxiety, too many writing programmes, too many king-and-queen-making critics, too many competitions (mediocrity assiduously crowning mediocrity); enfin, too many poets.”

Would you care to elaborate?

AS: Too often when I read new poetry, English or American, it all sounds alike. There are few individual voices. And the poems tend to be one- or two-dimensional, ignoring subtleties and nuances. Plop, plop, plop—in the indicative mood, allowing for few shadings or innuendoes. You don’t have to say everything you mean in a poem. In America, especially, there is too much earnestness around and very little word play. Get the words right, and the earnestness will take care of itself.

Nowadays, of course, “creativity” is a fashionable word. I once heard Hugh McDiarmid say outright, “Don’t encourage them; discourage them.” I tend to agree. I sometimes wonder if workshops actually do much good. Everybody’s so afraid of hurting each other’s feelings. Good criticism means you have to hurt people’s feelings. Poetry isn’t just a matter of learning technical tricks. Since most of the poetry people bring into workshops is personal and sloppy, applying “group technique” to it encourages a negative approach. I mean, you learn primarily what not to do: not to overuse adjectives, not to fall back on cliches, not to be sentimental, and so on. Unfortunately, this communal process of cleaning poems up and polishing them for publication results too often in just what you’d expect: processed poetry that lacks individuality and passion, or as Frost put it, “That Wildness whereof it is made.”

And then, the social categorization so ubiquitous today is destructive: women, race, class, age groups. Elizabeth Bishop remarked to me once that if you don’t stay well away from the gray world of ideology and theory, you will never become a poet. Emily Dickinson—not a bad thinker, you’ll agree?—developed her ideas through an acute awareness of what was around her in the world, whether it was a fly or a flower.

CH: Why do you think there are there so many poets today?

AS: Because they are given jobs—academic jobs in creative writing! I admire Dana Gioia in the way I admire Wallace Stevens because I, too, believe that if you’re good at writing poems, that’s something you do for love. As Frost wrote, poetry is both a vocation and an avocation. Dana, I realize, does lots of organizing and journalism to make a living, but he began as a businessman-amateur. You should say somewhere in the course of this interview that, in my view, Dana has done a great deal for poetry in America by single-handedly taking meretricious power-seeking by the scruff of the neck and shaking it, and, boy, did it need shaking! Perhaps now, though, he should think about quitting the battlefield for a while and go back to his plough. That’s one trouble with the American way of success—you get going on one of these high-flying swings and you can’t jump off. It’s amazing to me: I never would have been able to maintain the kind of schedule Dana does. Here I am, exhausted today after a single reading in Grassmere last night.

You’re going to have a hell of a job putting this interview together. But I hope you’re at least making some sense out of my mutterings.

[Stevenson goes to a bookshelf, gets a copy of 1998’s Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop.] You know, I think this book is better—at least it means more to me—than Bitter Fame. As you know, I was impressed and influenced by Elizabeth Bishop far more than I was by Sylvia Plath. Goodness, Bitter Fame was a struggle! After writing it, I became disillusioned with the so-called poetry scene both in England and in the States—so much commercial betting and marketing goes into it, so much taking up with this poets’ group or that.

CH: You have decried “poetry’s decline in the greater, sacred world of what matters.”

AS: In the long run, I suppose one has to say that, these days, poetry isn’t important to most people. Then you see that it actually is important, but to comparatively few. First you have to understand how little—materially—it matters. Like any art, the real stuff comes about through our human confrontation or quarrel with ourselves as Yeats said, but in later life, serious poets have to find and explore that “sacred world of what matters” pretty much for themselves.

CH: Poetic form has become such an important issue in the last fifteen years…

AS: Oh, I’m glad of that, because frankly, poets of late have been getting away with—if not murder, then surely verbal mayhem. Visual artists, too, over the last three decades have been getting huge prizes for producing nonsense. When the theory is there to be seen, the art usually isn’t. It’s no secret that “The Emperors New Clothes” has become the prevailing myth of the age.

CH: In Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, you note a letter you received from Elizabeth Bishop in 1964. In your words, “she quoted Gibbon on the decay of letters in imperial Rome, acidly implying that, in New York, the literary pundits of the twentieth-century had fallen to a comparable low: ‘A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.’” You imply, there and elsewhere, that things have not improved.

AS: No, not improved.

CH: What would it take to alleviate your pessimism?

AS: I suppose...oh, I don’t know. I’m a Democrat politically, of course. I have a strong, liberal sense of what is due to people as individuals, but I do believe that writing poetry is not something everybody needs to indulge in. Encouraging more and more people to express themselves and, above all, to publish poems or put them on the internet, does tend to thin the blood—of literature, I mean. People forget how to read. They forget that you need to develop a strong degree of attention to read intelligently the poetry of, say, Auden or Yeats, or even Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop. You need to be sensitive to all the sounds, rhythms, echoes, et cetera, that constitute a poem to know what’s going on in it. If nothing is going on except the promulgation of some one-dimensional idea or personal experience, if the so-called poem is nothing but a cut-up piece of not-very-interesting prose, then it isn’t poetry at all. It’s not asking anything of the reader, except perhaps fellow-feeling or sympathy.

On the other hand, it seems to me that poetry shouldn’t be an elitist art: that it should, in some way, appeal to the culture it reflects. The trouble is that our culture is so degenerate now—think of the garish, vacuous nature of most television shows—that it easily breeds degenerate poetry. Through television, language has become a thing of grunts, clichÈs, and sound bytes. People are not encouraged to concentrate. My grandchildren have a hard time in this respect. Anyway, all these factors reinforce each other: poor concentration, lack of knowledge, and an immense amount of technology that enables you to communicate much more quickly and gives you much less time to think about what you do communicate. Sometimes I get the feeling that thought, consideration, understanding—accumulated wisdom—might disappear altogether, so I’m pessimistic. I’m afraid I don’t think we’re living in a good time for poetry. Much of it isn’t art at all, has nothing to do with art. Instead, it has to do with the politics of getting on—with fame, jobs, money, life-style. Poetry ought to stand apart from all of that. It ought to constitute a critique of all of that.

CH: And yet there has been much talk of a poetry renaissance in the U.S. Do you think that it’s simply that the bar has been lowered?

AS: That’s right. Lowering the bar. Exactly! Set it so low you can step over it—easy! I like your expression, “lowering the bar.” Pretty soon there’ll be no bar at all, and that’s interesting, you know, because Americans are so demanding of themselves in other fields. In sports, you have to be almost super-humanly good to get anywhere these days. And musicians today have to have very, very high standards of performance. But so far as creativity goes, we’ve hit rock bottom—in some places, it’s become no more than a form of therapy. Please understand that I have nothing against therapy—but if you encourage people to write purely for the good it may do their psyches, you shouldn’t expect automatically to discover poets. Oh, yes, luck could turn up another John Clare or David Gascoyne or Ivor Gurney, but mostly...no.

CH: You’ve been poet-in-residence at a number of universities. Didn’t you teach creative writing on occasion?

AS: Yes, of course. But I thought of myself rather modestly as someone who could advise less-experienced writers—a sort of poetry coach. I mostly worked with individuals, and much of my advice had to do with what to read or with poetry that might help guide them. These days poetry courses are expected to produce prize-winning pupils and a blaze of creative glory all around. I don’t think I could bring myself to teach creative writing again. I do, of course, correspond with a few—trusted!—poets. We exchange critiques and so forth, but friendships between like-thinking writers has been common since poetry began. It’s the commercial aspect of the creative writing craze—teaching people to write for money—that puts me off entirely.

CH: Why?

AS: Because it isn’t really a subject. I would happily teach composition, grammar, sentence structure, other languages (if I knew enough), philosophy, English literature, world literature, even journalism, but not—not creative writing. Did Byron or Shakespeare, for that matter, ever dream of enrolling in classes in creativity? Did Auden or Frost? Consciously trying to teach people to be poets is, in some way I can’t really put my finger on, destructive. The Muse, I suppose, really isn’t all that nice! She hates rules, hates conformity, favors her special pets, gleefully drives worshippers to drink or drugs, happily drives other worshippers to suicide, is politically completely unreliable, and, being an unmitigated snob, she takes flight as soon as she hears the word “creativity.” Goodness, how she detests the word and makes fun of it over drinks with her cronies!

CH: Do you have any advice for young poets today?

AS: Study the poetry of all times carefully, but on your own or with chosen friends. Also study history. Study science. Study philosophy or psychology if you must. Study languages and the way they work. Study literature. But above all, learn to teach yourself. Follow your own nose and keep well away from the traps set by most university courses in literary theory—and in bogus creativity.

Cynthia L. Haven, a literary critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, has written about poets and poetry for newspapers and magazines throughout the U.S., including the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Stanford Magazine, and The San Jose Mercury. She has written two books on education, and has published essays, poetry and translations.

From my mailbox: Dana Gioia, poet and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, sent me the latest fruits of his labors. Dana has long been a champion of the of the overlooked poet Weldon Kees (1914-1955). According to poet Donald Justice, “Kees is original in one of the few ways that matter: he speaks to us in a voice or, rather, in a particular tone of voice that we have never heard before.” Dana has just published a catalogue of his own extensive collection with commentary, including works of fiction and non-fiction, broadsides, journals, music and recordings, critical works, and more. Here is the preface:

I first discovered the poetry of Weldon Kees in 1976—fifty years ago—while working a summer job in Minneapolis. I came across a selection of his poems in a library anthology. I didn’t recognize his name. I might have skipped over the section had I not noticed in the brief headnote that he had died in San Francisco by leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. As a Californian in exile, I found that grim and isolated fact intriguing.

I decided to read a poem or two. Instead, I read them all, with growing excitement and wonder. I recognized that I was reading a major poet. He was a head-spinning cocktail of contradictions—simultaneously satiric and terrifying, intimate and enigmatic. He used traditional forms with an experimental sensibility. He depicted apocalyptic outcomes with mordant humor. I had found the poet I had been searching for. Why had I never heard of him? Embarrassed by my ignorance, I decided to read everything I could find by and about him.

It was a Saturday afternoon. I had the rest of the weekend free. I drove to the main branch of the Minneapolis Public Library, heady with anticipation. I was eager to read all of his books. I also wanted to see what other readers thought about him. I knew my way around libraries—an important skill in those pre- internet days. Whatever books and commentary existed, I would find.

What I found after two days of searching was nothing. There was not a single book of any kind by or about Weldon Kees in the Minneapolis library system. His work, I also discovered, did not appear in standard anthologies. (I had read one of the only two anthologies that had ever featured a large se- lection of his poems.) There was no biography. There were no entries about him in the standard reference works. Nor were there chapters on him in the numerous critical books on contemporary poetry. He went unmentioned in the biographies of his contemporaries. There had never even been a full-length essay published on his work.

By Sunday evening, I realized why I had never heard of Kees. Hardly noticed during his lifetime, in death he had been almost entirely forgotten. A suicide at forty-one, Kees had succeeded in his last endeavor—vanishing. His body had never been recovered. Kees had been washed away from posterity with- out rites or remembrance. All his work was out of print. Worse yet, most of it—the stories, novels, plays, and criticism—had never been collected. Some of it, such as his first novel, had been lost entirely. Only the poems, a small, brilliant body of work, survived precariously—without criticism or commentary, almost without readers.

I decided then I would write a long, comprehensive essay on his work. It was not the sort of thing I had done before. I could not begin, however, without knowing more. I did not own any of his books. I knew few facts about his life. I began to search, gather, and collect. I not only found books, journals, and eventually manuscripts; I found people who had known and worked with him. I also discovered I was not alone in my intense admiration.

Three years later I published my essay in a special issue of the Stanford literary magazine, Sequoia, edited by my brother [jazz scholar] Ted Gioia. The issue stirred up a surprising amount of interest. I was soon planning an edition of his short stories, which had never been published in book form. That task led me to new material and new people. I had not realized that Kees had been a true polyartist who had not only mastered fiction and poetry, but also painting, photography, filmmaking, and jazz. I kept working on new projects, and the collecting never stopped. His audience also grew, though not among academics. His admirers were writers, artists, printers, and musicians.

This catalogue documents some of what I found in my search for Weldon Kees. It is not a conventional bibliography, it is rather a visual, historized biography that graphically traces the conscious art and life of a cultural worker, not just a poet. It describes a personal collection with commentary. It tries to tell the story of a writer through his books. It evokes Kees’ polymathic imagination from his art, music, and photography. It also reveals the existence of three of his large notebooks which document his prime years as a poet. I wrote this little book mostly for myself and a few friends. I hope it appeals to other readers, writers, and collectors. If this book is for you, you’ll know it.

Find some of Weldon Kees’s poems at the Poetry Foundation here.

Postscript from poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim: “I am amazed at the obvious labor that has gone into producing the catalogue and accompanying commentary. It is a beautifully produced book. The materiality of pages, artwork, colors, photographs is incomparable to anything I have seen. The 18 sections are lovingly organized; your preface sets out the framing of the book, and yes, the catalogue is not a bibliography, it is rather a visual, historized biography that graphically traces the conscious art and life of a cultural worker, not just a poet.”

From a letter Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Mikhail on 22 December 1849. From “Dostoevsky: Complete Letters”

George Szirtes meets King Charles III at Buckingham Palace

Glory doesn’t accrue easily to poets. Even less to translators, who tend to be behind the scenes, not preening in the footlights. But the exceptions can be stunning. Georges Szirtes, a London-based Hungarian poet and translator, is one of them.

On November 26, at Buckingham Palace, His Majesty King Charles III presented George with the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2024.

The words from George on the occasion of his elevation to glory:

”Here is the obverse side of the medal with its new design over which they took such time. This was the first time the King had a chance to present it. As you can see, it has Sappho and Homer on the back. The inscription around the rim is a line from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, by Wordsworth. It says: ‘Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.’ It takes some careful looking to make it out.

“As to the procedure, I arrived early at Victoria Station and found a place there that sold teriyaki chicken in a cup. I sat at a table in the cold concourse being circled by hopeful pigeons.

“Then, thinking I should check on taxis in good time I went to the rank and asked how long the trip to Buckingham Palace would take. The driver said taxis can’t go there because of the farmers protest. So I walked and got there in good time. The usual gaggle of visitors were outside the railings. At the correct gate I waved to the policemen (and soldiers with automatic rifles) who, having checked my IDs, courteously let me in. Simon Armitage arrived at the same time so we walked in together, both besuited, past guards as stiff as statues who did not give us a glance.

“Once inside we were met by Helen, one of Charles’s private secretaries – a Middlesbrough girl – and escorted into the large bow-windowed room and set down to wait. We were joined by a fully kilted and ceremonially dressed soldier - a young man but an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, as I discovered when I asked about the ribbons. Very handsome, as everyone else seemed to be. We waited over half an hour because the King was returning from Sandringham and was stuck in traffic.

It was fun talking to Selima. We had never met before. I liked her sense of humour. The six of us waiting there talked of this and that, of Dorset and Norfolk and Teeside, or words used by locals for tourists, of Kate Clanchy, of what it was like working at the palace.

Selima went in first for her ten minutes, a brief procedure waiting for open doors, waiting in the right place. Mimi wasn’t there as she was unwell. Then it was my turn.

How often he must meet people like this, I thought. There was another group waiting to follow me in. I don’t expect we will meet again. I liked him not because he was King but because he was good to talk to. He seemed a man free of smarm, pomp and patronising kindness.

An official photographer was taking pictures of the meeting and I was photographed all over again in a corridor, holding the medal. They’ll send me these.

Then the walk back to the station, und so weiter.

All rather dreamlike in retrospect.

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced? It’s only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature’s highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we’re expected! But there is no such place, that’s why it’s called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.”

―Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (Photo: Av B.E. Kondrasjkin. Lisens: CC BY SA 3.0)

NBC News: President Donald Trump on Tuesday added two Thanksgiving turkeys to his long list of second-term pardons, offering the birds a dose of his much-discussed presidential immunity.

After a White House speech that felt more like a campaign rally than a symbolic ceremony, Trump spared Gobble and Waddle from appearing on Thanksgiving dinner plates. He also joked that he was pardoning last year’s turkeys, Peach and Blossom, after a thorough Justice Department investigation found that President Joe Biden’s autopen use invalidated their pardons. “They were on their way to being processed,” he said.

***

I’ve always been ashamed of the annual White House ritual: the turkey pardoned for a crime it did not commit. Mock laughter accompanies the mock crime. Meanwhile, while thousands upon thousands of other helpless animals are slaughtered across the nation.

All across America, fractious families unite for the day over the real carcass of a dead bird – it is the very symbol of a national and familial unity. Is the Thanksgiving turkey a classic scapegoat? I figured I couldn’t be alone in my hunch, and I wasn’t. René Girard, who died earlier this month, is much on my mind this Thanksgiving, and he helps us get a handle on the strange ceremony, with a little help from his friends:

Harry Truman started it in 1947.

Karen Davis writes in More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality (Lantern Books, 2001):

“The idea of a Thanksgiving turkey as a scapegoat may seem like a parody of scapegoating, but what is the scapegoat phenomenon but a parody of reason and justice? The scapegoat, after all, is a goat. Animals have been scapegoats in storytelling, myth, and history every bit as much as humans and probably more, as the scholar of myth and ritual, René Girard observes in Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford University Press, 1988). Social animals especially have been scapegoated since time immemorial. ‘[I]n all parts of the world,’ Girard says, ‘animals living in herds, schools, packs – all animals with gregarious habits, even if completely harmless to each other and to man,’ have been vilified.

“This is not simply a matter of other cultures and ancient history. Evans shows how the belief that ‘everything must be “well-thought, well-said and well-done,” not ethically, but ritually, contributed to the fact that until quite recently, European societies hauled birds and other creatures before the bar in legal ceremonies as absurd as any scene in Dickens. ‘[E]xtending from the beginning of the twelfth to the middle of the eighteenth century,’ he tells us, the culprits were ‘a miscellaneous crew, consisting chiefly of caterpillars, flies, locusts, leeches, snails, slugs, worms, weevils, rats, mice, moles, turtle-doves, pigs, bulls, cows, cocks, dogs, asses, mules, mares and goats.”

Jared Christman explores another angle of the ritual, writing in Grave Pawns: Civilization’s Animal Victims: “The pardon therefore performs the same basic function as the scapegoating sacrifice theorized by Girard in Violence and the Sacred, although instead of one special victim being scapegoated, every animal except for one special non-victim is scapegoated.”

Eisenhower kept it up.

“Around the Thanksgiving table, the cultural relations of the nation merge with the blood relations of the family. Through the carcass of the sacrificial victim, the family becomes a microcosm of the nation and the nation becomes a macrocosm of the family. The size of the culinary victim is key: the entire turkey can be dismembered and consumed at a household gathering. This creates a ritual symmetry between the dimensions of the victim’s body and the dimensions of the cultural building block of the family. …

“This sovereign ‘pardon’ of a token animal has become ritually necessary because the industrialized scale of Thanksgiving creates a pressing need for expiation and the shifting of blame from the victimizers to the victims. Against the holiday’s backdrop of rampant factory farming, the pardon of the “innocent” bird scapegoats every other “criminal” turkey for advanced civilization’s sins against nature. …

“With each passing year, the comforting illusions of the Thanksgiving feast, its New World mythology, conceal less and less the industrialized context of the sacrament. Any serious pretense of the new Eden is long gone. The bird upon today’s Thanksgiving table is a bloated, assembly-line caricature of the wild turkey of the 17th-century American woods. Of course, even the mythology of the original Thanksgiving of the Plymouth pilgrims was a bright shining lie. The cagier fowl of yesteryear’s table was the victim of a ritual protocol of nation-building about as new as the Old World hills.”

Well, there you have it. History has it that the real Thanksgiving was celebrated in St. Augustine, Florida, some years earlier in 1565, when the Spaniards shared a communal meal with the local Timucuans. What was on the menu? Bean soup. Read about it here.

Update: NPR is onto the story here.

Another Update: A comment from George Dunn: “It’s a ritual sacrifice, with pie.” ~ Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Republished from The Book Haven