January 2017

I was in my early twenties when my aunt handed me a VHS cassette with my mother’s name written on the label. My aunt and mom worked at a school for hearing-impaired children in Oslo, Norway, and at some point in the 1980s the school introduced video technology

The woman with sandy brown hair was nodding and smiling and crying as she sat behind the wheel of her stationary car on the Southeast Freeway in Washington DC. We made our black-clad way through the rows of quiet vehicles while chanting and clapping and smiling at those we...

A few months after the end of the United States’ bicentennial year, and an unassuming, unpublished junior professor from Wordsworth and Southey College in bucolic Susquehanna, Pennsylvania found himself at the center of a media firestorm that was jocularly called “Miltongate.”

In the interwar period, the system of broadcasting pioneered by the BBC was referred to as ‘remote state control’. It emerged from a situation where politicians did not want a chaotic system of broadcasting to develop, especially given the presumed political power of the new medium.

Mothers don’t eat. It had come to my attention that mothers were fueled by something other than food: possibly telephone talk and worry. I wondered how old you had to be to turn into a mother and not have to eat anymore.

Rumi was born in the early thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan. He later settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, with his family. His father was a preacher and religious scholar, and he introduced Rumi to Sufism.

While it’s easy to see how this establishment structure could provoke an uprising, two developments over the last decade have made it especially susceptible.

by Steve Mentz Motion disorients bodies. When they are moved, bodies seek stable refuge—whether the bodies in question comprise shipwrecked sailors, strife-torn nations, dislocated asylum-seekers, or even confused students. Poetry offers a partial, not always effective, response to motion sickness. In disorienting times and places, we imagine refuge—while not averting...

What many literary critics overlook, however, is the fact that the schlemiel has also found its way into the pages of great Anglo-American writers like John Updike (see his “Beck” series) and Thomas Pynchon.