Poetry allows us to meditate on our everyday experiences in ways that unearth profound mysteries we so frequently overlook. But to be more awake, more conscious, requires not only breaking from routine but also cultivating a different sense of time.
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The Moviegoer: Suburbia, the Search, and Binx Bolling’s Existential Homelessness (Book Recommendation)
The movies tend to conceive of despair, as they do of love, in terms of external obstacles that are overcome, end-of-story. So they gloss over our existential amnesia, and they confuse our actual despair (our wrong relation to God, self, and world) with felt despair. As Binx Bolling sees it, this apparent comedy is really the tragedy of man accustomed to despair. The man may have regained the world, but it turned out he never had a soul if his predicament is reducible to [re]obtaining the American Dream.
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Politics, Publishing, and Snowy Woods
Unless you were paying close attention, you may have missed a momentous occasion in politics and publishing earlier this year.
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The Iliad: A Poem of Force and Pity
This is, as far as I can tell, what we get from the first great war epic: the demystification of the glories of war and the tragic delusion of Force.
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Epitaphs for the Journey (Book Recommendation)
For me, when I’m really in a poem, it’s the same as being in the middle of a prayer. It really is. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all the poems are going to be religious poems, except maybe in some very, very deep sense.
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“I’ll tell you about despair, mine.” A Tribute to Mary Oliver
I was sitting at home, coffee in hand, when one of those breaking news articles popped up at the top of my iPhone screen. “Mary Oliver, poet, dies at the age of 83.” My heart sank. I let out a sigh and tears welled up in my eyes.
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Memory and Imagination: Ebenezer Scrooge’s Human Awakening
By encountering Ebenezer Scrooge as a human being, we also encounter ourselves. We are not simply creatures with the capacity for choosing good and evil, but intricate weavings of fate and freedom, intellect and sense, memory and blindness. By awakening to Scrooge’s humanity, we awaken to our own.
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2019 New York Encounter
Are you hungry for an extended engagement with reality, for something that will awaken you more fully to the human condition? Consider joining us at the New York Encounter, February 15th through the 17th.
