“That should get the juices flowing for those of you with any interest in composing rhyming poetry, and in struggling within the constraints of chess, corsets, cross-stitch, and cricket . . . all…

“I am the only person I know in our neck of the woods for whom the city does nothing at all. I didn’t feel thwarted or closeted or invalidated in my childhood, which…

“My husband falls asleep the moment his head hits the pillow, with big band jazz blaring on the Bose; but it takes half of what the R&D folks at Sanofi-Aventis and Sandoz have…

“The thresholds—the two thresholds all of us pass over, descending into sleep, ascending into what we consider to be full consciousness—are the most precious, fertile, productive, and often fearful or blissful or alien…

“For a 20th-century woman poet to be taught solely by men, and men with very fixed ideas about what poetry might be, and who might write it (especially Dickey), was not, I think,…

Ruminant With A View “Arthur Schopenhauer said that given our ‘three score and ten’ allotment, a wise division would be 40 years devoted to the ‘text’ and 30 to the commentary. My division…

Ruminant With A View “That I have such a hat at all—some three feet in diameter, made of fine Carludovica palmate, bordered in iridescent mint ribbon and festooned with ashes-of-lilac flowers—necessitated first having…

Ruminant With A View “Alice gave my mother the gift and power of literacy. Of solid if simple Upstate-Carolina-Settler stock, my mother had great fluency in English: she was a natural scholar and…

Ruminant With A View “Father Theologos, whose sentimental education had progressed apace over the winter, showed up at our house one spring morning to find the doctor and me on our verandah, me…

“All of us who fall are mythical: Elpenor and Icarus and I./Callow, fearless, mythical, misplaced, and mourned. Oh deeply mourned./But not unburied.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring Ruminant With A View By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring BRIDGE & TUNNEL…