newcritics

At the age of 94 Studs Terkel finally sat down and wrote his memoir Touch and Go–a book so capacious in its varied carols and its assemblages of American curios that reading it is like falling down a flight of stairs while pasting rare stamps in an album. One is astonished by the worlds revealed [...]

In one of his wise and funny essays the poet Theodore Roethke wrote: “Stick out your can, /Here comes a lesson plan.” Roethke was for many years a professor of English both at the University of Washington in Seattle and at Bennington College in Vermont.
I used to think the lines were merely lowbrow comic relief [...]

I have several friends who are physicians and scientists and lots of friends and acquaintences who are writers. Sometimes the two groups meet in my presence like two wandering tribes who have been traveling a long way across the steppes of Russia. You can always tell these tribesmen and tribeswomen apart because the scientists dress [...]