Wallace Stevens

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Nicholas Carr. W.W. Norton. $26.95. 276 pp. If you retain any residual aspirations for literary repartee, prefer the smell of a book to a mouse and, most important, enjoy the quiet meanderings...

Let me just say that my memories of school lunches involve having to eat liver and spinach on Fridays or no ice cream. Owl Meat's are a little...different. Here's guest poster Owlie. ELSometimes a new relationship involves fights – fevered......

Scrapple, the ultimate mystery meat, turns out to be quite the poetic muse. The first annual Dining@Large Scrapple Poetry Contest drew so many hifalutin entries that I brought in a man of letters as judge: John McIntyre.John is returning to......

Book review: ‘The Best of It: New and Selected Poems' by Kay Ryan The Best of It New and Selected Poems Kay Ryan Grove: 270 pp., $24 Contemporary poetry is a bit like visual art. Much of it makes you grab your chin and nod in stumped...

The Ojai Music Festival has a long tradition of picking some of the era's most important artists to serve as its music director, a position that rotates annually. But though the festival has sometimes chosen more than one person at a time for the job,...

Daunting as it may be to assemble a centuries-spanning assessment of any country, even one with a fairly linear march through history, how does one approach a culture as unstable, contradictory and contested as ours? Where do you start? Where do you stop?...

When I was in my early 20s, living in Berkeley and drifting toward a PhD in Russian literature, I started writing poetry. It was a completely unexpected development. I definitely hadn't been one of those kids in high school who worked for the literary...

Slumberland A Novel Paul Beatty Bloomsbury: 244 pp., $24.99 I first heard of Paul Beatty in the 1990s, when Europe was awash in young black rebels trying to forge a new identity against the backdrop of insidious racism. We wanted to be black and...

"Immoveable Feast" by John Baxter (Harper Perennial) Baxter, the film critic and biographer of Spielberg, Buñuel and others, fell in love and moved from Los Angeles to Paris some years back, from whence he has dispatched a series of fluent, witty and...

The math behind eighth blackbird’s program Tuesday night at the Orange County Performing Artscenter, titled "The Only Moving Thing," was this: The ensemble, based at the University of Chicago, takes its name from Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen...

James Thorpe, former director of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens who helped raise the public profile of the institution, turning it into one of Southern California's leading educational and cultural centers, has died. He...

I first heard of Paul Beatty in the 1990s, when Europe was awash in young black rebels trying to forge a new identity against the backdrop of insidious racism. We wanted to be black and proud, as the song went, but we wanted none of the nationalist...