As the magnificent Molly Ivins’ wrote, You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You. Someone brought you to the dance of who and where you are now, and good manners instruct us that you can’t abandon them for someone you see across the room whom you are sure would make you shiver with new life forever, plus have more money and cable stations.
So who brung you? Right now, in these Trumpelstiltskin days?
For me, it was some plainspoken, decent women who brung me to the dance:, I celebrated forty years clean and sober last week, the great miracle that led to everything beautiful and of value in my life. I mean that: Everything. I lucked into the gift of desperation, an acronym for God that I now share with newcomers. The sober women with whom I’ve danced for forty years now told me that the God I didn’t believe in was the same God they didn’t believe in. Instead, they believed in a higher power that might be called grace over drama, groups of drunks, good orderly direction, the great out-doors. They predicted that if I didn’t drink one day at a time, and didn’t die, I would end up a great old dame who had survived incredible losses and disappointments, but was filled with daily gratitude and amazement. And voila, c’est moi, still a little funky around the edges but transformed into a person of service.
That was one graceful dance partner.
Yes, things are all in decline hereabouts—memory, balance, vision, hearing, stamina, and let’s not even mention the knees—but not in heart and soul. Plus, not to brag, but I bet I can beat you at pickleball. I went from July of 1986, when my alcoholic insides were laced with electrical hopelessness and fear, to July of 2026, when I periodically have a different kind of dark and radioactive anxiety, but thank God I am sober, and I turn to them what brung me.
What brung me to my spiritual and political beliefs were Martin Luther King and Gandhi and good old Jesus, who spoke of peace and crazy, reckless love, of one human family, of one overarching truth—that goodness and justice were bigger than any bleak shit the White House could throw at you.
Molly brung me to a fiercer commitment to political activism, to an almost spiritual passion for democracy and justice and loyalty to We the People. I find it very hard, without Molly alive, to survive these days with all my f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s, as Salinger’s Esme put it. But Molly is around in my memory, heart, in her books and in the breathtaking light she cast. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. It sure feels like it has some days, and then I remember Molly’s words: “Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government, is on the high road to permanent glory.”
God, she could make me laugh, and laughter fills me with bubbly hope. We are not only surviving, we are fighting back peacefully, and overcoming, not just in the polls, but in our activism and fundraising. The sheer number of people dropping everything else to donate and work on campaigns of good people running for House and Senate seats is beyond inspiring. That’s what Molly would be watching.
I watch Trump’s decompensatiom—his growing insanity in the wake a terrible economy, the ICE killings, the catastrophic and unpopular war in Iran—and I remember the end of the story of Rumpelstiltskin, another tale of cruelty, hubris and greed. The newly-crowned queen turns to the good people of her town for help—she has to figure out the impossible, Rumpelstiltskin’s name, or lose her firstborn. And someone comes up with it! They hear him sing it in a bizarre, crazy narcissistic dance deep in the woods. One wonders if it included small fist bumps in front of his body. Someone was there, paying attention, and heard the answer. When Rumpelstiltskin realizes he’s been had, he flies into a rage. In one version of the tale, he stamps his foot so hard that it gets stuck in the ground, and in his rageful efforts to break free, he tears himself in two. This is what we are seeing now.
Let me ask you this: Who brung you? Who gave you faith in yourself and life and the human spirit? Was it a teacher, a friend, a writer, a movie, an experience of trust or service or compassion? Remember them, and breathe. We need you on the dance floor.
‘Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid. I mean my own body…Now it’s like an empty house.”
Lonny Pini She is Sleeping Beauty, by the Art Deco master, Erte.
* * * *
“By why, Ligurinus, alas why this unaccustomed tear trickling down my cheek? – why does my glib tongue stumble to silence as I speak? At night I hold you fast in my dreams, I run after you across the Field of Mars, I follow you into the tumbling waters, and you show no pity.”
"The fact that a symbol possesses an indefinite number of aspects does not mean that it is imprecise at all. Indeed it is its reading on an indefinite number of levels which confers on it its extreme precision. Commenting on the theatre of Samuel Beckett, Brook writes:
“Beckett’s plays are symbols in an exact sense of the word. A false symbol is soft and vague: a true symbol is hard and clear. When we say ‘symbolic’ we often mean something drearily obscure: a true symbol is specific, it is the only form a certain truth can take... We get nowhere if we expect to be told what they mean, yet each one has a relation with us we can’t deny. If we accept this, the symbol opens in us a great wondering.”"
~ Peter Brook, “The Empty Space”, cited in “Peter Brook and Traditional Thought” by Basarab Nicolescu, Gurdjieff International Review
COMMUNISM, forsooth. That's hilarious. That's a kneeslapper, right there. No, really, that's hilarious. Because Republicans LOVE communism. They do. They love communism, they couldn't love it more.
No no, don't even. Sit down.
What Republicans really love is communist LABOR. They love everything about it: dark grim factories filled with cheap labor, no unions, no worker's compensation, no environmental laws, no safety regulations, no OSHA, no Human Resources and NO child labor laws. 18 hour days. 100 hour weeks. Just pure profit.
They absolutely LOVE communist labor, and you don't get communist labor without communist government.
Conservatives spent decades shouting OH NO! THE REDS ARE COMING! Then one morning, they suddenly realized they could triple their profits by shipping all of your jobs to communist countries. Those massive salaries CEO get nowadays? Those $100 Million bonuses? That endless shareholder value? You don't get that by making Instapots and TVs and iPhones in a CAPITALIST country where you actually have to PAY your labor a living wage without dumping toxic shit into the local water supply.
The current form of American consumer capitalism can't exist without cheap exploitable labor in foreign countries that don't give a damn about their citizens.
And so the idea that Republicans are going to stop communism is hilarious.
There ain't nobody in the world who loves communism more than a Republican, because communism makes them rich.
Republicans: Millionaires Working For Billionaires to Take Away Healthcare and Homes for everyone else.
Senate Republicans just voted to let an AI algorithm with a financial stake in saying “no” decide whether your mother gets her knee fixed. On Thursday, a Democratic resolution to kill the Trump administration’s WISeR program went down 46-50, every no vote a Republican.
WISeR — “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction” — a name a Bond villain would reject as too on-the-nose — went live January 1st and imports the single most hated feature of the Medicare “Advantage” scam, prior authorization, into traditional Medicare, with AI making the call on things like knee arthroscopy and nerve stimulator implants. As the Medicare Rights Center notes, the private contractors running the algorithm share in the savings generated by the care they deny. They get paid to say no.
Sen. Cantwell’s office found Washington seniors waiting two to four times longer for doctor-ordered care since the program started there, from about two weeks to as long as eight. The GAO ruled the whole thing should have come to Congress first; the administration shrugged.
Rep. Suzan DelBene, who’s been chasing this thing for a year, called it what it is: “a back door to privatizing Medicare.” Republicans have loathed Medicare since LBJ signed it in 1965, when Reagan himself cut a record warning it would end American freedom. They can’t repeal it — the voters would burn Washington down — so they’re doing it the modern way: outsource the killing to a machine, take a cut of every denial, and call it efficiency. One campaigner summed the Republican Party up as “a group of millionaires working for billionaires who will rip healthcare away.” Sixty years of trying, and they finally found a hit man who doesn’t leave fingerprints...
Christopher Nolan’s largely deity-free blockbuster adaptation only highlights the humanity of the original.
The Odyssey Was Never About the Gods
July 17, 2026
If you lived in the Bronze Age and were sailing the wine-dark sea, you’d soon understand the need for gods. You don’t know about low-pressure systems or atmospheric circulation, about ocean currents or the contours of the seafloor. You know only that the sky has darkened, the wind has shifted, and the waters have begun to rise. The sudden appearance of thunder, lightning, and towering waves crashing against the hull demand an explanation: gods. Zeus and Poseidon are at it again—one hurling thunderbolts, the other whipping the sea into a frenzy. Or perhaps Athena has withdrawn her protection. You offered sacrifice before setting sail. Maybe one bull wasn’t enough?
The randomness and unpredictability of existence, the mindless violence of it, necessitated myth. This early religion was a kind of technology, an attempt to make order out of chaos.
There are so many reasons why the stories of ancient Greece endure, why they are some of the first narratives I remember from elementary school, why my daughter’s graphic-novel version of The Odyssey is so tattered. Yes, these stories have monsters in them, heroic adventures, and black-and-white morality tales. But they also plunge deep into a primordial place: into our essential helplessness, and the desire to conquer it with meaning.
The Odyssey is the greatest example of this in the Western canon; it is a story about a man whose heroic deed is survival—who simply wants to set right what has been upended. Odysseus longs to regain his place as a father and husband and leader. He wants to go home. His son, Telemachus, wants to correct the wrong that is occurring in Ithaca, where suitors have violated the codes of hospitality and are aggressively vying for his mother’s hand. Penelope, the queen, wants to return to a time of stability, when Odysseus ruled and her place was secure, and when everyone knew what was expected of them. “The worst thing humans suffer is homelessness,” Odyssesus says, and I don’t think he’s referring just to being lost at sea. (I’m quoting here and elsewhere from Emily Wilson’s translation.)
The Odyssey as a human-scaled story is clearly what the director, Christopher Nolan, had in mind for his new blockbuster version. In one interview about the movie, describing the process of beginning to write the script, he said that he’d put the poem away and written down just what he remembered of it, and what had come out was something “earthy and intimate and relevant and accessible.” This is how I’d describe the film. What stuck in his memory were the human characters and their personal struggles, and what he forgot were the gods.
For all the culture-war debates about the liberties Nolan took in his casting, his most radical deviation from the text has to do with agency and who has it. In the poem, the gods are forever manipulating the story. Athena is like Odysseus’s overbearing coach, offering hints about what’s going to happen in the future, egging him on, and occasionally cloaking him in disguises. Poseidon, upset that Odysseus blinded his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, decides to make his return home difficult and long and wet. The gods do occasionally point out that humans have more choice than they think they have. “This is absurd, that mortals blame the gods!” Zeus kvetches. “They say we cause their suffering, but they themselves increase it by folly.” This may be true, but it is also true that the epic can sometimes resemble a game of foosball between Athena and Poseidon.
How does personal responsibility enter into this world of unfathomable dangers? On one level, this story—and every myth—is about the intervention of the gods in human affairs. But closer to the ground, we can understand that those gods represent all of the many forces outside our control, which means we still have some autonomy. You have to make moral choices despite all of the external pressures weighing down on you (call them gods, if you will). Odysseus is told by the sorceress Circe that he will have to sail through narrow straits that will force an impossible choice on him: on one side Scylla, a six-headed monster who will grab six of his men for lunch, and on the other Charybdis, a colossal whirlpool that might destroy his entire ship. He has to decide. And he chooses to sacrifice six men rather than risk losing them all.
In the film—which stars a steely-faced Matt Damon as Odysseus (one part Jason Bourne, one part Mark Watney from The Martian)—this moment is presented as something like the trolley problem in moral philosophy: Can the hero curb his instinct to be heroic and brave the whirlpool, and instead make a decision that will save the greatest number of people?
Nolan’s version of The Odyssey places significant weight on these questions, especially on what we do to maintain order and whether we act graciously toward one another—an ethic of hospitality referred to as Zeus’s law. In what I found to be the most striking sequence of the film, Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, is speaking with Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) about the Trojan War and the disruptive technology he came up with to break the siege: the Trojan horse. In the classic tradition, this bit of strategic genius is the ultimate proof of Odysseus’s mētis, or cunning intelligence. But here, he talks about it with remorse. He played a trick on the Trojans by exploiting the culture of gift-giving. We’ve already seen the sacking of Troy in a heroic flashback, staged as a crafty trick, but now we revisit it—as a war crime.
Odysseus tells Penelope that, once the Achaeans finally breached the walls, he witnessed “10 years of rage” unleashed; under the glow of burning houses, we see women being dragged away to be raped, looting and wanton murder everywhere. Damon as Odysseus looks stunned as he sees the consequences of what he has wrought. To draw a parallel from the Nolan canon, he is J. Robert Oppenheimer reckoning with the unintended effects, physical and moral, of the weapon he has created. Odysseus even implies that his delay in getting home might have as much to do with a guilty conscience as with intervening gods or the enchanting sorceress named Calypso.
In another famous episode, when Circe (Samantha Morton) turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, she explains her spell-casting by describing the men’s pillaging and abuses in war as piglike. She is giving them back their real identities, she says, and judging their character in ways that simply wouldn’t make sense if their fate were out of their own hands.
Where are the gods in all of this? They appear in the film the way they would appear to humans: through thunder and lightning, through the elation of triumph and the experience of pain and longing. Among the major gods, only Athena is personified (by an ethereal Zendaya), but she is not the warrior goddess of the poem. She is more like a projection of Odysseus’s own conscience, materializing the way an angel might land on one’s shoulder. She represents his desire for goodness, home, and order. (In the scenes of Troy’s sacking, we return to a repeated image of Athena’s statue being beheaded, the ultimate violation.) This is all very far from the dominant film depiction of Greek mythology that I remember from my own childhood, 1981’s Clash of the Titans, in which the gods hang out together in togas on Mount Olympus, with Laurence Olivier as Zeus dictating much of the action.
Nolan’s film has already been knocked by some critics for its psychologically modern portrayal of Odysseus as a man plagued by PTSD and haunted by that horse. And his version is undeniably meant to speak to us now as well as to avoid some serious turnoffs, such as Odysseus’s boasts about looting and taking slaves. Nolan’s anti-war message can also occasionally come off as anachronistic, as when Odysseus tells Penelope that the Trojan War is not really about retrieving Helen but actually about Agamemnon’s efforts to secure trade routes—I doubt I’m the only one who heard an echo of the troubles over the Strait of Hormuz.
And yet, for all that makes this a 21st-century Odyssey, Nolan has captured something essential about why the story still matters and always has. The gods were there only as a way for people to make sense of the senseless. Why does a child die? What causes natural disasters? Who brings on the cycles of violence that each side knows will lead only to more death and destruction? We can imagine that we have more sophisticated explanations for most of what affects our lives than the ancient Greeks did. But this is the false comfort we find in science; there is still so much outside of our power. The best we can do is what Odysseus does—try to keep it together, make decent choices, value our relationships to one another. Even with all of the gods and monsters, this is still just a story about whether one man will get to go home to his wife and son. If this means something after thousands of years, maybe that’s because the desire for solid ground in a baffling and chaotic world is unchanging.
Early in my research, I was even surprised to learn that for a handful of years, Didion was a movie critic for Vogue. In January 1964, eight years after she started working at the magazine, an announcement appeared in the Movies column: a young writer named Joan Didion would be reviewing films, alternating weeks with another writer, named Paul Breslow. (Soon, Didion would briefly share the column with a pre–New Yorker Pauline Kael.)
In her introduction to her column, Didion started strong: “Let me lay it on the line: I like movies, and approach them with a tolerance so fond that it will possibly strike you as simple-minded.” Further on, she elaborated that she didn’t need her movies to be masterpieces—“neither L’Avventura nor Red River, neither Casablanca nor Citizen Kane.” She required them only to have what she calls “moments,” which translates, roughly, to points where she feels something.
Didion’s movie reviews have not yet been collected into books. That means that when I first read this column—with the help of a librarian at the New York Public Library, who in the pandemic’s early months jumped onto Zoom to help me access the Vogue archives—I was surprised. Knowing she’d been around New York’s literati for a long while by the time she took on this role, I assumed she had the taste of a young 1960s cinephile: a little snobbish, fond of underground and downtown cinema, obsessed with form and with auteur theory. She didn’t.
While not undiscerning, Didion had quite populist taste, and the more I read, the more often I disagreed. She declared that Billy Wilder, the director of Some Like It Hot, had “only the most haphazard feeling for comedy”; that Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World was almost so bad as to “not be worth mentioning”; that Sidney Lumet’s films were “dutifully rendered and almost totally unfelt.” She wrote at length about how irritating it was to watch a movie in which an actor played against type, how frustrating crime movies were when they became “cast studies of deranged individuals in a sane society” rather than old-school gangster films.
Like most movie critics, I disagree with critics—even the ones I think are great—all the time. So Didion’s film reviews intrigued me because they revealed a mindset about movies that you can trace through her later writing, heavily influenced by being brought up in the golden age of the big studios. To her (and to Dunne), movies were predominantly entertainment turned out by large-scale teams designed to tug at your emotions, rather than the gritty, artist-driven form that would come to dominate the New Hollywood.—Alissa Wilkinson for Air Mail
Billy Wilder’s letter to Joan Didion.
+
David Berlin
Someone, I forget who, described Joan Didion as a "neurasthenic Cher". It suits.
James Grissom, Writer
David Berlin It was Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. “Only Disconnect.” When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer -- not entirely facetiously -- that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo; I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator's having pleated instead of gathered her new diningroom curtains. These, and other assorted facts -- such as the fact that Didion chose to buy the dress Linda Kasabian wore at the Manson trial at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills -- put me more in mind of a neurasthenic Cher than of a writer who has been called America's finest woman prose stylist. (Thinking of Didion's drapes, it occurred to me that in the worst of all possible worlds, Franny Glass might have grown up to be Maria Wyeth of Play It As It Lays. Her faith in the Jesus Prayer permanently misplaced, and possessed of no secular equivalent to fill the vacuum, in her second incarnation Franny is Maria, a fragile madonna of acedia and anomie. This feeling was confirmed when I reread all of Didion, an activity that, trust me, is roughly akin to spending several days in the company of Job's comforters.)
In his final days, Franz Wright tapped into a rich vein of material, recording dark, beautiful, and self-deprecating poems on tape and in sc
A Dying Poet’s Farewell to the World
In his final days, Franz Wright tapped into a rich vein of material, recording dark, beautiful, and self-deprecating poems on tape and in scribbles all over his apartment.
By Dan Chiasson
July 13, 2026
“Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments” collects work written just before Wright’s death, in 2015.Illustration by Christoph Niemann; Source photograph by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright
Writing poetry made the late Franz Wright miserable, but it was an improvement on just about everything else in his life. His mentor in this essentially comic predicament was his estranged father, the poet James Wright. When Franz was fifteen, he sent his dad a seven-line poem. The elder Wright’s response soon arrived from New York City, addressed jauntily from one “good craftsman” to another: “Franz, I am non-plussed,” the younger Wright recalled, in a poem. “I’ll be damned. You can write. What can I say? Welcome to Hell.”
It was the only home they shared, and Wright took advantage of his father’s hospitality. In fourteen volumes of poems, including “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, Franz Wright made Hell habitable, almost cheerful. “Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments” (Knopf), assembled by the poet’s widow, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, after his death, in 2015, collects work from the days when Wright was maintaining what John Keats called a “posthumous existence”; dying from lung cancer, he dictated some of these tender, hardboiled, and wisecracking poems into a tape recorder, too weak to write, or left them as voice-mail messages for friends in an “odd-sounding croak that was once a good voice.” Photos taken at Wright’s apartment after his death show lines of verse written on the walls, on the appliances, on coffee filters, and, the most Boston thing evah, carved with a ballpoint into a Styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cup. It looks like a crime scene, if writing poetry were a crime. “I feel like Philip Marlowe sometimes,” Wright wrote, lost in a “Los Angeles of words.”
As his voracious sentience began to cleave away from his suffering frame, this “facsimile of the person” became more and more a poet of the estranged body: “I am traveling away from my body in widening rings,” he writes, and yet, “If I think I have problems, / I look for the mirror.” Any errand outdoors makes him a kind of zombie Frank O’Hara, clomping down the quiet chain-link and brick-faced blocks near his home in Waltham, Massachusetts. Even a trip six blocks to the post office is an “exceptional event, long planned.” Wright’s spectacular disarray—you worried about him, just running into him on the street—was always first an occasion for self-ridicule: spotting his own reflection on a bus one afternoon, “I looked like a suicide / returning an overdue book to the library.” On the edge of death, though, the scenario becomes nearly slapstick; strangers who come across Wright’s body on the sidewalk move “around him, the way you would / dog shit.”
Wright’s poems are usually at least a little funny, and often work like extended punch lines; the way to read them is to try to guess the elided sick joke. What happens to the body of a lifelong smoker when he dies? In “Involuntary Detox: Smoking Porch,” it keeps smoking, of course, but not in any old crematorium:
Time for one more?
What are you waiting for?
Then come in.
The nicatorium’s all yours.
Nicatorium! Wright went through many periods of detox, and was institutionalized several times; here he is welcomed by a stock character, the catatonic roommate who promises he hasn’t “said a word / all day, and don’t intend to / now.” Or maybe that’s a bored crematory worker, just punching the clock—or is it God, whose weird, voyeuristic silence troubled Wright into composing some of his most powerful poems? In any case, the smoker gets his wish, and his comeuppance: “Consider yourself completely alone.” That’s a poet’s fantasy, and a child’s darkest fear.
In these poems, anticipation is inextricable from dread. Emily Dickinson received “Heavenly Hurt” from the winter “Slant of light” entering her bedroom. As a boy, Wright kept his eye on the door, hoping that the father he idolized would someday return; to maintain this vigil into adulthood is to open oneself up to grace but also to injury. Waking in the night, Wright wonders if there is “someone else / who wakes disturbed, alone; / too bad we can’t talk / on our tiny phone.” In another insomnia poem, “Wait,” Wright keeps watch for the “late light,” which is “always / leaving” even “as it arrives.” For a child, this “steplight” could bring comfort, or it could bring a drunken thrashing. Wright wrote that his father beat him with a belt; his stepfather, he went on, “took over / somewhat more expertly.” If the soul survives, these poems suggest, it’s only by being battered out of the body.
“Axe in Blossom” borrows its title from a line in “I Hear,” by the German Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, who drowned in the Seine in 1970. Celan’s shattered “neversongs” taught Wright important elements of his own style: the lines narrowing as they approach silence, like water disappearing down a drain; the clauses and multisyllabic words split like cordwood by line breaks; the pressurized neologisms picking up where available vocabulary runs out of road; the rich, sometimes asphyxiating details that make a beeline into the senses. In an homage, “Axe in Blossom: To Paul Celan,” the dead are called back to life by the “mere scent of their wives baking bread.” It takes a little more, in fact, than the “mere scent”: it takes an elegiac poetry of sensory nearness that mixes such things as warm bread and burning bodies. Wright is something like a laureate of the putrid, the stale, the acrid, and the moldy, but also of unbidden, stunning adjacent beauty: the “still-daytime / three-quarters moon, / the first snowflakes, swirling,” even as the new day itself is unthinkable.
Celan’s influence is tricky to absorb for any poet who did not suffer in a labor camp or witness his parents taken away to be murdered by the S.S. It is impossible to isolate Celan’s aesthetic innovations from his trauma and its historical meanings; Wright preëmpts that bind by presenting his own suffering as sort of lame and clumsy. It keeps him, in these last poems, from putting his finger on the tragedy scale: there are “so many things worse than death,” he writes, and killing, even killing a fly, is one of them. He quotes the haiku master Issa:
Oh why would you swat them, the poor
things, forever
wringing their skinny hands
Wright’s body is dog shit, after all—don’t kill his companions! “More than ever I am haunted by the lives of the small, brief, powerless, filthy, and poor,” he writes. But “filthy” suggests something less than a Buddhist’s commitment to the flies’ well-being. In other poems, Wright has some fun at the expense of a cricket (“my friend describing you over the phone, chronicling your brief life and fairly gruesome end, both of us guiltily chuckling”) and a moth (“once it observes you have noticed it or given any indication its presence is a nuisance, you will very soon find yourself the perpetual loser in a chronic contest of wills”). We don’t read Wright for the purity of his moral life but for the erratic comedy of his good intentions yielding to blurted reversals and denunciations.
All the unresolved, zigzagging impulses give even Wright’s finished work here some of the raggedness of drafts. “Axe in Blossom” is in every sense an open book, practically an open studio. We see its striking title gestate through multiple phases—in a translation, an original poem, and a collage poem made from lines by Celan, Czesław Miłosz, and Rainer Brambach. There are “Three Homages,” two poems called “The Writing” (the second, marked “2,” is presented first), one poem called “The Lamp, 2” that insinuates an absent predecessor, two called “The Kiss,” and so on; the poems reshuffle the same vocabulary, the same images, the same settings and themes. The volume begins with more or less “complete” work, passes through some abandoned drafts, then trails off into an appendix, “Burial Herbs,” which works like a commonplace book of maxims, partial poems, and poems nominally complete but “unfinishable,” in the sense that certain poems, perhaps the most ambitious ones, only approximate their maker’s vision.
Among the “unfinishables” is a poem that I consider a masterpiece, probably one of Wright’s very best. Dedicated to the German poet Karl Krolow, “At His Desk in the Past” was “transcribed from self-recorded drafts on audio,” in 2012. It’s “raining in a dead language” out the window, as Wright measures the duration of his life against various phenomena—some brief, like an infant’s fever, some ancient, like the stars. The poem, written in linked prose blocks, is too long to quote in full, and is quite intricate. But one passage gives a sense of its eerie logic. Wright describes the words of his poem “still traveling toward the world although he is not there although he is not here or anywhere”:
AND we’d do it again wouldn’t we—every last one of us choosing precisely what we had been given, a glimpse of a night sky—no—choosing precisely what we had been given not to be a sky of infinite diamonds unaware they live forever or exist at all but a pair of mortal eyes with the glory to see them, grieving their loss, a glimpse.
Wright welcomes those stars into his own “BRAIN or desert hive this named mind or single roaring.” The poem ends by conferring a childish name, a name that a kid might dream up, on these sad, undying presences, with their “honey-colored irises” and “muted wings” of light and motion: “BEE-iridescent.”
Rounding the bend, the book tours Wright’s points of origin: recollections of his first poems, his first trip to Europe, his first cigarette, the first signs of the addictions that so blighted the poet’s life. Wright hears now “the sound of my name posed, in my young mother’s voice before I finally slept.” The poet tucks into his deathbed, its “sheets / the color of old aspirin”:
I had often wondered
where I would find it,
it find me, or
what it would look like.
Don’t you?
But, hey, it’s not a deathbed until you die in it: “I could get some work done / here, I shrugged,” Wright decides. “I had done it before.” ♦
Published in the print edition of the July 20, 2026, issue, with the headline “One Last Thing.”
Gordon Mortensen (American, born 1938) Double Iris, 2002
* * * *
“Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“It is understandable why some find this cop-out appealing: the overall pattern is ominous. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States has been gutted in every sense: economically, psychologically, and under Trump, militarily, with even the secretary of defense position remaining unfilled for eight months. Post-9/11 America inaugurated an era of panic over fabricated catastrophes and false reassurances about real ones. The Trump era has only exacerbated those tendencies, leaving everyday Americans struggling to process horrific new revelations about which officials rarely provide clear answers. It can therefore be comforting to dismiss disturbing details rather than focus on the big picture. To reconcile with an attack on America as a continuum—instead of the result of an aberrant atrocity like 9/11—is to contend with the prospect of permanent dysfunction.”
― Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
“The world outside of me has no meaning independent of my thinking it. (pauses to look) I look out of the window. A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: chair. So she is sitting. I think: book. So she is reading. Now the young woman touches her hair where it's come undone. But how can we be sure there is a world of phenomena, a woman reading in a garden? Perhaps the only thing that's real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading- in a universe which is in fact empty! But Immanuel Kant says- no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. Without me there is something wrong with this picture. The trees, the grass, the woman are merely- oh, she's coming! (nervously)- she's coming in here-! I say, don't leave!-where are you going?”
stormborns
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