L’arithmétique mène à la philologie, et la philologie mène au crime.

-- Eugène Ionesco

POETRY, etc.                  

The first three categories below include links to items written in the 1980s (with the sole exception of one composed in 1997 on the occasion of the passing of my mother). At that time I studied poetry and poetry criticism for the purpose of understanding archaic Greek poetry better, and as a natural consequence tried my hand at a few lines myself. I make no claims as to the quality of the results, but this is a personal website and they are part of who I am or at least was.

I. Poems proper (in some sense).

Introduction

Or, as the haiku puts it,

The Fall

Landslide

For Hesiod

1984

Ode to Lisa, in Memory of Michael Stewart

Thirty-two anapests for quantum chromodynamics

untitled (Gallery)

Variations on Charles Olson, with Deference to Anaximander and Yājñavalkya

For Rilke (Folk Life Festival)

To Walt Whitman et al. (In Memoriam: Edgar J. Beall, 1907-1986)

To Hemisappho

Three triplets

Seashore impressions

To Verna Marsh, July 5, 1909 - November 24, 1997

II. Silloi

Postcard from Earth

According to the New York Times science report

According to another New York Times science report

According to still another New

Lake Woe, begone

Personal

III. Occasional pieces in prose

Meson

Derrida meets Coyote

IV. Washington Post letters.

During the early years of the 21^st century I wrote several dozen “letters to the editor” of the Washington Post, on a number of subjects. It published only one, on September 11, 2002 (apparently deeming that example acceptable because the paper was publishing several letters on this day under the banner “remembrance,” whereas in discussing response to the alleged watershed event a year earlier in my relatively mild letter I happened to use that word for no particular reason). Despite this record, I like to think that my submissions and similar efforts by other people the paper considered unsuitable contributed to the editorial room’s internal strife that other local media have reported on the issue of the Iraq war in particular. In any case, the following is a sampling (also including an e-mail to another section of the paper at the end).

On certain animal representations

On Israel and the Palestinians

On spiders and Muslims

On the Iraq war I

On “the human sciences”

On athletic team names

On the Prince Georges County, Maryland police

On Librarians of Congress

On cicadas and cicadas

On the Iraq war II

On Watergate, or, on the Iraq war III

On “irregularities” by the FBI et al.

On Turin vs. Torino Olympics