Browse Sections

Whether Blind Or Seeing

When I was still young I experienced a look which opened deeply, darkly, vitally inward: I knew then that infinite reality does not work only by extension outward, but, also, inward.

The Last Barrier

A Journey Through The World Of Sufi Teaching

“Today we are going together to meet the Perfect Man, the Master who has come to love God so perfectly that God’s attributes pour out through him into the world with no veil between.”

Tobacco Town: Durham’s Beginnings

The rising lust for smoking tobacco made Durham and Duke. In 1870, a year after it was incorporated, the one-square mile village had a population of 256. There were 3,000 residents by 1884, 6,679 by 1900, and an estimated 18,000 by 1907.

Tarnished Gold

Our Seed Stock Is In Jeopardy, But Do The Seed Companies Care?

Corn is the most valuable United States crop. When a few companies, or a few varieties, dominate its seed market, conditions are ripe for economic and ecological disaster.

What Is A Poet?

The poet has a mind capable of raising for us all crops of words, dense with meaning, rich in symbols, exactly expressive for us all of what our lives are like, what our human condition means, what we feel, why we keep struggling, why we sometimes can’t go on.

I Never Noticed They Were Poems

His poems entered his conversation almost unannounced, and you were unsure whether he was still talking or had started on a poem, a seeming change in his bodily weight sometimes the only clue (he began that weightless dance with every poem).

An Appreciation

He is a poet of immediacy, of the nearness of all things to us in the inner and outer worlds, and of those things we bury, by our blindness, in the rich compost of our lives. When I experience a Bly poem, I enter the miraculous energy of life and the awesome closeness and beauty of death.

An Evening With Robert Bly

Every poet, when he grows up in this country, has to face that issue. Is he going to go with the English or is he going to go against them? It takes a long time to fight that out. I, myself, was with the English three or four years after I got out of college. I was writing sonnets.

Different Drummers

Book Review

Brother to a Dragon Fly is first and foremost the story of Joe Campbell, but as the book proceeds, it seems to become a history of the civil rights movement. Will Campbell’s unadorned style is at its most effective when reciting those events both moving and terrifying.

The Arts: The Politics Of Filmmaking

In the course of reading a book we have time to change our mind about things, or anyway, the author has time to change our minds. But seeing a film is different. Not only the brevity of the event, but the limited intellectual possibilities of the medium itself make it almost impossible for a filmmaker to challenge (uproot, enlighten, deepen?) the filmgoer’s attitude about the way things are.