Sonora 🌵🌞
Turbulence! What a bouncy road! What joys and hard leaving 🛶
We drove the whole way down the coast with the car packed as full of five people leaving a city for the last time. Cannon Beach, OR was a palate cleanser en route, a perfect seaside town that understands what it is and what it isn’t.
And we arrived in Arizona, to friends and family and space and ease, oh precious ease. 😎 sweet desert order, ardor!
They’re right that the sky is better here, more articulate. They’re right that the people are kinder; open faces, helping hands everywhere. They’re right about the heat; it hurts. I’ve known of course this desert as long as I’ve known anything, having made my debut in these here parts (in the parlance of the locals), but it is every time disarming in its cleanliness, color, fecundity.
I’m eager to get to the office at my new place, ACU, but I wanted to drop a line about some work I’d promised you.
Publications
First up, this essay about Frederick Buechner as a Shakespeare reader. The last class I ever gave at SPU was on Winters Tale, so I was thinking about loss and grace, and this is what came of it. Oh and here a link to the whole first edition of the Buechner Review. It’s a pretty impressive festschrift, I think. (And it’s going to continue! Stay tuned!)
Next up, I wrote this review of the new Charles Taylor book for my friend at The Gospel Coalition. Now that I’m looking back at it, I think the main problem is the book’s pitch. As a study of poetry, it’s fun times (if a bit wild), but the book is framed as a study of Romanticism, which it manifestly is not. Seriously, just changing the subtitle would alleviate a good deal of disappointment.
Reading
Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Such fine little observations, Proustian in the best sense
This essay about my new city in The Atlantic
Chris Wiman on Seamus Heaney
Listening
Not One Light Red
This is a compilation of music from the Phoenix underground circa y2k. When I moved to Seattle, I drank only wine from the state as a way to tell myself I’d arrived somewhere different. This is like that.
Luxury/ Like Unto Lambs
A grower that didn’t grab me at first, but my how it blooms! How, as Richard Wilbur says, “the view alters.” Quickly becoming indispensable for me.
Andrew Bird Trio/ Sunday Morning Put On
Bird’s hushed and arpeggiated compositions plus jazz? Mad fer it.
Oddments
Those barnacles who have not yet been shorn from the sea stone that is Seattle, can Mark Burrows speak about Rilke, translation, and spirituality. And soon!
You can also catch up with me, maybe, as I’ll be back in Seattle Aug 5-10 to hear poems from the amazing Bruce Beasley, among other things. Do we owe each other stories? Time to pay up. (Feel free to get in touch if you’re available)
Hey, one more thing: I’ve just started buying DVDs as I ween from streaming services. So, if you’re about to drop off your collection of 1940’s classics or whatever at the Goodwill, maybe send me an email first?