A careful first draft is a failed first draft

We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling.

These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust. What's it for, anyway, in this hard-edged, worried world? Into this cultural uncertainty Gregory Orr's spirited meditation on the surprisingly tensile strength of poetry in the face of profound suffering and grief presents a welcome fresh view of the ancient human instinct to cry out and to praise.

Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort.