“Don’t scorn your life just because it’s not dramatic, or it’s impoverished, or it looks dull, or it’s workaday. Don’t scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you’ve got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.” ― Philip Levine 1. The first poem I remember hearing was Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” I was seventeen and flush with testosterone and pride … Continue reading Dirty Miracles: An Excavation of Southeast Michigan
by Katie Davenport Ralph Waldo Emerson and I don’t get along. At least, I’m assuming we wouldn’t have, had we both lived in the same century. His belief in the divinity of man and his failure to account for evil compel me to agree with Herman Melville’s assessment of his philosophy: “God help the poor fellow who squares his life according to this.”[1] And yet, … Continue reading A Time to Listen, and a Time to Ignore: Finding Your Voice in a Sea of Criticism
A Christmas Karl “You know Engels and Brezhnev and Trotsky and Lenin Castro, the Chairman, and Krushchev and Stalin But do you recall The most famous Comrade of all?” The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. From the patrician and the plebeian, the lord and the serf, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, we see this struggle. Here is the … Continue reading A Christmas Karl
We face two facts of life during December: Christmas is upon us and we are tired. We will soon return to family in other cities and other states, communities that did not delight in or endure the same things that we did this fall. There may be a sense of dissonance. Maybe this is not everyone’s experience, but sometimes I find it is mine. When … Continue reading Letter from the Editor, December 2016
By Hannah Niemeier Poet Peter Gizzi doesn’t like language any more than a geologist likes dirt; sometimes it gets in the way of his meaning. But what he finds beneath the dust of worn-out words is always precious: It was a language to eat the sky a language to say goodbye standing with others standing in the dust. The old language continues its … Continue reading Death Declared, Life Questioned: Peter Gizzi Resurrects the Lyric Poem
It’s been nearly a year since my trip to Israel, and I am still trying to process it. Maybe it’s because the trip was wedged between two hectic and difficult semesters. Maybe it’s because I had no idea what to expect, especially since the only knowledge of Israel I had to bring with me on the trip came from the Bible. Or maybe it’s because … Continue reading The Bedrock of Israel: Churches and Sacred Places in Israel
Hillsdale is not the real world–but it can teach us how to live there. By Madeline Johnson The trip from home to college or back is a sort of trauma, the trauma of dying in one world and being born into another. In the portal between the worlds, that single moment of death and birth, you are utterly alone, the unaccountable soul that counts as … Continue reading There and Back Again: A Student’s Tale
By Amelia Stieren On Sunday afternoon last August, a car hit 21-year-old Vinny Kurtz while he was riding his bike in the small college town of Marion, Indiana. In critical condition, he was airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Fort Wayne where doctors removed part of his skull to alleviate swelling and attempted to amend his collapsed lung. Vinny did not live past the … Continue reading Friendship in the Face of Separation and Death
By Chandler Ryd During the past four summers, I have worked as a gardener. I pulled weeds, cut grass, planted flowers, trimmed bushes, and raked leaves, and as I worked, I listened to audiobooks on Spotify. I fell in love with Hamlet, Don Quixiote, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and heard from G.K. Chesterton, Langston Hughes, and Jane Austen. Through those peaceful, meditative summers, … Continue reading Letter from the Editor, October 2016
By Grace Marie Link “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s not it, is it?” After watching the eight-episode television series, viewers will relate to Dustin’s lament at the end of the beautiful, exciting, and inspiring Stranger Things. The series includes all the necessary ingredients for a successful television show: skilled cinematography, intriguing plot, killer soundtrack, and nuanced characters played by top-notch actors. It brings the viewer … Continue reading Stranger Things and the Return to Faerie: A Contemporary Recovery of the Moral Imagination
Hillsdale Forum 