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POETS Day! Poems from Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium
He’s famously hard to decipher, threads his poems with an idiosyncratic symbolism and teases those who tried to put together a key, and prizes sound and…
8 hrs ago
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Ben Sears
May 2026
POETS Day! The Present in TS Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages”
A life of contemplation and worship may be well and good for saints and mystics, but what, asks the speaker in “The Dry Salvages,” about the rest of us?
May 29
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Ben Sears
Gentrified Camp Mountain Lake Red-Eye Gravy
Everyone but Heather and me was off fighting about line-cutting at the folding table buffet. He called us over, pulled us into conspiracy. “You want to…
May 24
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Ben Sears
1
2
POETS Day! Poems from Minna and Myself, by Maxwell Bodenheim
He a had a talent for image and metaphor that, with a little discipline, could have made something memorable. Instead, he drank and pissed it all away.
May 22
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Ben Sears
POETS Day! Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
Pound was trapped, enamored by the static image, caught between the craft of Apollo and verve of Dionysus.
May 15
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Ben Sears
POETS Day! Dorothy Wellesley
W.B. Yeats gave her a surprising fifteen pages in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. For comparison, TS Eliot got twelve. Pound got six. He only gave…
May 8
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Ben Sears
1
POETS Day! Hugh MacDiarmid Thistled While He Worked
He’s a tremendous English poet for a rebellious Scot.
May 1
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Ben Sears
April 2026
POETS Day! Apes in Hell
You find out the strangest things reading introductions to books.
Apr 24
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Ben Sears
2
POETS DAY! Keats Gets Snippy About Wordsworth
It’s unclear whether Wordsworth offended him or if he felt others mistakenly took offense to his manner or deeds. It’s a curious little enigma.
Apr 17
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Ben Sears
1
Mayo Is Evil: A Brief History
I hate mayonnaise. I hate it desperately. I think mayo is vile. My wife thinks it’s evil. Distinction without much difference.
Apr 13
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Ben Sears
1
POETS Day! George William Russell, Co-Host of the Irish Literary Revival
I can’t decide if he’s mimicking a medieval hierarchy or flattening prejudice and treating real and conceptual on equal footing.
Apr 10
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Ben Sears
1
Refire A Classic: Deconstructed Salisbury Steak
This is not the comfort food steam table stuff. This Salisbury steak is cleaner and satisfies a different hankering.
Apr 7
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Ben Sears
1
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