LATER UPDATE: Wednesday afternoon (July 1) Guilford College posted a statement confirming our report of extensive job cuts. Here it is in full: Guilford College President Jane K. Fernandes announced today that the College will reduce its personnel as part of cost-cutting measures following reduced revenues this summer. “This is a hard step to take,” … Continue reading Breaking: Axe is Falling at Guilford (Updated)
So– the City of Charleston South Carolina wasted no time. After the City Council voted unanimously on June 23, 2020 to take down its landmark monument to John C. Calhoun, a crew swung into action, starting at near midnight. It was no small task to pluck the figure from its 100-foot pedestal. It took the … Continue reading Quaker Statues Have to Go? That’s What George Fox Said . . .
The Quaker Widow, By Bayard Taylor THEE finds me in the garden, Hannah,—come in! ’T is kind of theeTo wait until the Friends were gone, who came to comfort me.The still and quiet company a peace may give, indeed,But blessed is the single heart that comes to us at need. Come, sit thee down! Here … Continue reading “The Quaker Widow”: A diverting poem for our moment?
Biographers note that Emily Dickinson, who was born on December 10 in 1830, was most productive in the first half of the 1860s. Secluded within the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts (except when tending the flower garden), she turned out hundreds of poems, mostly short, striking, often astonishing — but unnoticed by the outside world; her fame came after her death, which was likely okay with her.
Biographers speculate about what spurred this massive outburst (she left 1700 poems behind, almost none with titles, given numbers instead). Some extended personal crisis? Missives to a secret love? (She did seem to have some “affairs of the heart,” but most were entirely epistolary, and the few signals are mixed enough to suggest some may have been same sex.)
I haven’t read all the biographies, but want to dip my amateur oar into this rippling reflecting pool, to mention a possibility not dwelt upon in those I’ve seen: could the flood of verse have been her way of coping with the Civil War?
Logan’s target here is The Flame [“Poems, Notebooks, Lyrics, Sketches”], which he says, “has a little of everything for Cohen fans and nothing for anyone else. . . .”
And he goes on from there, to trash Cohen’s verses, his singing, the music, his many romances, etc.
The poems are monotonous scribbles of the moody-undergraduate school, what young Werther would have sung had he been Canadian.
(Of course he had to work in a sneer at Canada.) But I smiled all the way through Logan’s snide harangue, remembering the night I saw Cohen in late 2013 in Brooklyn, in the waning days of his endless tour.