What stays with me in reading Ashbery is the sense of existential loneliness beneath the linguistic play and multiple voices.
Paul Mariani
Paul Mariani, poet and biographer, is a former poetry editor at America and University Professor of English Emeritus at Boston College.
Posted inPoetry
Operating Room, Upper East Side, March 1945
Those wooden floors with their pine-scented antiseptic
Posted inArt
In the Footsteps of Ignatius: Following a saint through Spain
Following a saint through Spain
Posted inFilm
Searchers: James Franco, Hart Crane and me
Together with director James Franco, Paul Mariani set out to find the poet, Hart Crane.
Posted inPoetry
The Fathers: For Fr. Bill McNichols
From house to house he treks, and inn to inn, the feral dogs
Posted inCulture
History and Language
How to approach—I mean adequately approach—the devastating reality of Ground Zero from Ground Zero? What happens to perception, history, language, syntax and grammar—to say nothing of lungs, flesh and brain—at that level as the second airliner rips into the swaying tower fill
Posted inPoetry
Hopkins in Ireland for the Jesuit community at Boston College
Above the bluebleak priest the brightblue fisher hovers.