The Poetics of Natural Being: Buddhism, Creativity, and Nature

Lama Elizabeth Monson

As a writer, a poet, and a Buddhist, I have practiced to use language to communicate something fundamentally beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond any possibility of description. That something is the deepest nature of our being, a state of being…

History Of My Heart: Opening and Closing Passages

Robert Pinsky

One Christmastime Fats Waller in a fur coat \ Rolled beaming from a taxicab with two pretty girls \ Each at an arm as he led them in a thick downy snowfall \ ...

“The Poetics of Entanglement”: Three Poems & Introducing Two Young Poets with First Books

Judson Evans

“The Poetics of Entanglement” is a phrase I have come to use to talk about what I want from my poems and what I value in the poetry of others. I draw the metaphor from quantum physics and Darwinian evolution.…

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks and the Social Sickness of Racism

Miguel Morrissey

Racism is rampant and unspoken, denied and obvious. In a country of diverse terrain, we nonetheless remain connected via media, social utterances, and responses to certain events. It is easy to say “I am not a racist” or to believe…

Trump and the Battle for Human Nature

Frances Moore Lappé

Feeling blindsided, baffled, or just bewildered, Americans are asking, How did we get here? New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat likens the experience of observing Republican dysfunction to seeing “a calf born with two heads…watching something that the laws…

The Danger of Reading The Single Book: a plea for Cross-Cultural Reading

Chika Unigwe

One of my favorite poems- and has been since I was a child- is “The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe. This poem illustrates, perfectly, what I call the Danger of Reading the Single Book. It was…

The Rise of the Self and the Decline of Intellectual and Civic Interest

Danielle Moreland Ochoa

Today sitting at the top of skyscrapers with smart boards projecting the profits of the future, we believe ourselves to be at the peak of human existence. One is tempted to believe that the amazing progress made by the human…

Deprivation

Charis Tan

Jack Sparrow: I know those cannons. It’s the Pearl. Man in Jail: The Black Pearl? I’ve heard stories. She’s been preying on ships and settlements for near ten years. Never leaves any survivors. Jack Sparrow: No survivors? Then where do …

Imperishable Value

Danielle Moreland-Ochoa

I always love discovering my own beliefs. Those moments when an idea is brought to your attention and you are forced to confront how you actually feel about it. It can be satisfying and liberating! Or it can pull out…

Velvet Darkness: Roger Corman’s Enduring Take on Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”

Victoria Large

“The Masque of the Red Death” is among Edgar Allan Poe’s most-read short stories, and it is also among his most dreamlike, or, it might be more suitable to say, his most nightmarish. Poe tells the story of a prince…