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“WRITING POETRY IS an unnatural act,” Elizabeth Bishop once wrote. “It takes skill to make it seem natural.”

Teju Cole • Known and Strange Things

In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made... See more

Maria Popova • Figuring

Take the case of the American poet Wallace Stevens. By day he worked in an insurance company, eventually becoming vice-president of an established firm in Connecticut. But he was no workaholic: he returned home each evening to write verse, and was considered one of the great modernist poets of the early twentieth century. Stevens kept these two liv

Roman Krznaric • How to Find Fulfilling Work: The School of Life

Thanks to the help of some fellow poets, Brodsky was able to find refuge in the United States and soon he had teaching positions at Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Michigan. In 1991, nineteen years after being exiled from the Soviet Union (and what must have seemed like an entirely different lifetime), Brodsky was appointed the United States... See more

James Clear • Joseph Brodsky Explains Perfectly How to Deal With Critics and Detractors in Your Life

Death of an Author

Julie Tabberer

“Flotsam

Ruth Ozeki • A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel (ALA Notable Books for Adults)

As the poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1851, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

Phillip Lopate • Writers and Their Notebooks

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat. A true line acts like a lightning rod in a storm.

David Whyte • The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

At the advent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into