Every political moment has its tropes. Our current political moment has at least two. The first, used to describe any dizzying scale of change across time, stems from a reminder by Mexican poet Homero Aridjis ) though it is commonly attributed to a paraphrase by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin): “There are decades where […]
Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymchuk was in town the last couple of days as a guest of WashU’s International Writers Series and on tour for her new English-language collection, Still City (November 2024, Pitt Poetry Series). She has previously published two collections in Ukrainian. Maksymchuk is also a scholar and literary translator; she […]
The world knows Howard Nemerov as twice the U.S. Poet Laureate, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, a distinguished professor and poet-in-residence at Washington University for twenty-one years—and a bit of an enigma. A stylist impatient with literary pretension; a deep thinker who held up wit and irony […]
Recently on a trip I picked up a copy of The Southern, the regional newspaper for Southern Illinois, where I grew up. The paper is physically smaller than it used to be, but the fact that it is still printed is remarkable. The Pew Research Center said, a couple of years ago, […]
WashU’s Center for the Humanities hosted an event last week titled Fragment, by Russian theater director Dmitry Krymov. To be honest, I did not know beforehand what I was going to see. The brief promotional materials said it had something to do with Chekhov’s Three Sisters. I had hopes it would be […]
The Good Book has gained so much critical mass as a required read in U.S. public schools—most notably in Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana—that we could almost mistake it for a Marvel Movie franchise if not for its age. One of the first symptoms of texts as old as the Bible is […]
I was down at the Friends of the Library sale again. A big literature anthology called to me from the shelf, “Hey you. Six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry here, hardbound, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan, by the dictate of Elbasy Nursultan Nazarbayev, […]
It was a good day for The Common Reader on December 10, 2024, when the inaugural Gerald Early Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Dwight McBride, was installed in a ceremony on campus at Washington University in St. Louis. Chancellor Martin called the ceremony “a profound testament to friendship, scholarship, and the […]
Rory came over again from the old place. His wife had been gone three weeks this time, and he would drive to the airport to get her after we ate pork nachos. We have known each other for twenty-five years. To kill time, we talked about writing for a platform on […]
Capitalizing on Christmas lost its shame so long ago that we often feel almost duty-bound to return the holiday to its Christian roots in search of what we nebulously acknowledge as meaning. This narrow pursuit denies Christmas’s celebrants in two ways: first, by blinding us to the holiday’s pagan origins and customs; […]
