"To see and lose at once her being"

I have just been made aware that the Mars Hill Audio Journal, that great repository of wisdom and good talk, has included an interview with me, on truth, goodness, beauty, and the nature of liberal education, in its new issue. Click the icon at left to preview the current issue, and, please, consider subscribing.

To see is to gain, perhaps to gain forever as knowledge. But to see may also be to lose, as Orpheus learned long ago. To see, for instance, the new issue of Measure is also to be weighed by loss, for this is the final issue, bringing to a close a magnificent run. The magazine is in the process of being reborn as an online journal, and that is very good news; but nothing can quite replace the semiannual appearance of a thick little journal with wonderfully well measured poems, selections from new books, and essays on prosody. It will be missed. In the last issue appears my poem, "On a Broken Electric Guitar String." As the journal comes to a close, I've decided to provide a scanned copy of the poem, which you can read via the Measure icon below. I hope you enjoy it.

​Readers who have followed my announcement about a second, revised and expanded, edition of Some Permanent Things, to be published shortly, will also be aware that I've strongly revised my standards for meter and above all rhyme, over the last few years. Any work that falls short of those standards is being revised to conform to them now. That includes this new poem; I missed the deadline, alas, to send a slightly tightened version of the poem to the editors before press time. A few rhymes don't satisfy anymore. In three or four years, when On the New Physics is published, a properly taut version of the poem will be included in my All Things sequence.

Finally, Rod Dreher was kind enough to print one of the poems from The Hanging God on his blog at The American Conservative. "How Many Exiles in the Monastery" seems like a very fitting poem to capture the interest of the author of The Little Way of Ruthie Lemming and How Dante Can Save Your Life​. The responses to it, alas, makes one doubt the literacy of contemporary readers, but I do invite you to visit his page, if not the ever depressing comment box. Click the TAC​ logo to have a look.

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