A Conversation with Composer John Metcalf: Discovering the Paths of Song

When Welsh composer John Metcalf opened the door to us, he apologized that he couldn’t shake our hands.  He’d been kneading bread and hadn’t quite finished.  He’d already alerted us that we shouldn’t buy any vegetables ahead of our visit, as he had a large organic garden “which you can raid when you're here.”

Why Less is Sometimes Waaaaaay Too Much, or This is Just to Say

For a long time I’ve been interested in setting William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” alongside Eliot’s “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” to raise questions about not only these two writers’ poetics but poetics in general. Chief among these questions is, How does one arrive at X poetics at the expense of Y poetics? The essay I’ve been writing on literary influence (nearly finished, I hope) and these two entries here have given me a chance to work out some of my thoughts.

The Virtues of Difficulty

I had intended this, my first post here, to address the literary economy in some way. As co-director of the Pages & Places Book Festival in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and as we’re deep into the planning for the 2010 festival, our second, I'm now contending with all the expected difficulties regards, for example, convincing government officials and even grant-giving foundations to support a celebration of books. So I have plenty of opportunity, let’s call it, to realize to what degree lovers of books and reading are but a tiny minority.