This site is no longer updated but feel free to browse around, there are tons of links in the archives. Thanks to all who came and supported when the Arrow was breathing. I suggest these substitutes:

HJ Bacchus - writer, social critic, and rabble rouser

The Dust Congress 

Conversational Reading 

 UBU Web

Henry David Thoreau's Blog...seriously 

The Page Poetry, essays, language, ideas

Arts & Letters Daily 

A Country Ruled by Faith

By Garry Wills

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Fragment, Juxtaposition, And Completeness: Some Notes And Preferences by Tony Hoagland

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Miles to Go Before We Sleep

Three days of reading, drinking, and skirting catastrophe on the Wave Books poetry bus.

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"Here is my theory: I think people who ride the F train know who their fellow riders are, and save the trashy reading for home. On the F, they pull out only their hippest and most intellectual pursuits. Like the mythological “disco cars” of the 70’s, the last cars of certain trains that were supposedly reserved for using and selling drugs, the F is reserved for those who read books reviewed in The New Yorker."

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1. "If you see my reflection in a snow-covered hill."
2. It's just how things line up (turn sound on)
3. Pyramid huh? Like a scheme?
4. George Lakoff has the way for Democrats to win at the polls: conservatives must be treated as morons, taxes renamed “membership fees”.
5. Bill Knott, a wonderful poet, has decided his time would best be spent putting his work up on a website instead of playing the publishing game.
   
6. Plucked
7. Green Death
8. Systematic  propagation
   

Redwings
by James Wright

It turns out
You can kill them.
It turns out
You can make the earth absolutely clean.

My nephew has given my younger brother
A scientific report while they both flew
In my older brother's small airplane
Over the Kokosing River, that looks

Secret, it looks like the open
Scar turning gray on the small
Of your spine.

Can you hear me?

It was only in the evening I saw a few redwings
Come out and dip their brilliant yellow
Bills in their scarlet shoulders.
Ohio was already going to hell.
But sometimes they would sit down on the creosote
Soaked pasture fence posts.
They used to be few, they used to be willowy and thin.

One afternoon, along the Ohio, where the sewer
Poured out, I found a nest,
The way they build their nests in the reeds,
So beautiful,
Redwings and solitaries.
The skinny girl I fell in love with down home
In late autumn married
A strip miner in late autumn.
Her five children are still alive,
Floating near the river.

Somebody is on the wing, somebody
Is wondering right at this moment
How to get rid of us, while we sleep.

Together among the dead gorges
Of highway construction, we flare
Across highways and drive
Motorists crazy, we fly
Down home to the river.

There, one summer evening, a dirty man
Gave me a nickel and a potato
And fell asleep by a fire.

"We've decided to put to one side these moribund institutions that serve no purpose and push for the revolution of consciousness so that the people can decide."

“It is hypocritical that OECD-based companies continue to bribe across the globe, while their governments pay lip-service to enforcing the law. TI’s Bribe Payers Index indicates that they are not doing enough to clamp down on overseas bribery,” said David Nussbaum, Chief Executive of Transparency International. “The enforcement record on international anti-bribery laws makes for short and disheartening reading.” (pdf)

James Wright: Two Moments in Memory

by Gibbons Ruark 

One: Fiesole, 1974

This is the table where we eat our breakfast of panini and coffee and oranges, and where, after the dishes are cleared and the girls are off to school and she is off down the hill to her Italian lessons in the Via Dante Alighieri, I sit down to read and write. The only window opens onto the back valley of Fiesole, the Mugello Valley, where the river twists like a silver thread through a rumpled fallen cloth. This morning I am reading in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, the passage where the medieval master Cimabue discovers the shepherd boy Giotto sitting on the meadow grass and scratching the faces of his lambs onto the side of a boulder. Just as Cimabue is about to touch Giotto's shoulder, the doorbell jangles and a cry comes up from the street: "La posta!" In the mail is an envelope from my friend Michael Heffernan in Kansas bringing simply a page or two from The Ohio Review, James Wright's "Lambs on the Boulder," where he recalls Cimabue discovering the boy Giotto sitting on the meadow grass and scratching the faces of his lambs onto a boulder. Michael has written across the top of the page: "I thought you'd like to see this beautiful man." From a great distance, someone is touching my shoulder.

Two: Whitemarsh Creek, 1974

This is my old friend Sandy Hammer's family cottage on Whitemarsh Creek in the Chesapeake backwaters. We are all here together gathering breakfast. First we drop a few lines in the water off the little dock and catch handfuls of shivery perch to fry up with the hotcakes. Then we pick blackberries off the bush outside the kitchen door for dessert. The girls are delirious. Dessert after breakfast! There are two or three hammocks strung among the tall pines. Full from our breakfast, we laze in them most of the morning. Then I say to Hammer the poem "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." Hammer, who once sat me down on the floor of a fraternity house in Chapel Hill and patiently explained to me the intricacies of Auden's "In Praise of Limestone," says, "That's not bad for a poem." He has become a city planner. Later, thinking of the little fish we caught for breakfast, I am moved to say the poem called "Northern Pike," which ends,

"There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy."

"Hey," says Hammer, "a poem about fishing. I could go for that." There is a fresh breeze in the sails of the boat tied alongside the dock. In the cattails at the water's edge, redwing blackbirds dart and flicker and come to rest, showing us their scarlet epaulets. "All we need now," I say, "is a James Wright poem about redwing blackbirds." The next afternoon, in a library a hundred miles north, I open the new issue of The Nation, and there it is, a poem by James Wright called "Redwings." You will remember it. It is the first poem in To a Blossoming Pear Tree. Believe this. It will make you happy, because then you can believe anything.