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Jan 12, 2025 | 
freebeacon.com | Joseph Bottum
By the time the novelist David Lodge died on January 1 at the age of 89, the obituaries had long been written, gathering dust and occasional updates in the as-needed folder on the desktops of magazine and newspaper editors. And when they were published in the days after New Year’s, they struck an amazingly similar tone. "British author David Lodge, known for novels satirizing academic life, dies at 89," the Los Angeles Times headline read.
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Jan 12, 2025 | 
conservativereview.com | Joseph Bottum
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Jan 6, 2025 | 
poemsancientandmodern.substack.com | Sally Thomas |Joseph Bottum
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAlready a spider’s run a shining skeinBetween one standing magus and one who kneels,Offering myrrh. Outside, a too-warm rainPounds the early spears of daffodilsWho’ve rushed their cue and think it’s Holy Week. Inside, the manger occupies all mantels. The child is everywhere, and wise men seekHim still, throughout the house. In knots of threeThey travel, bearing fragile gifts that breakFrom their re-glued-on fingers.
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Dec 21, 2024 | 
conservativereview.com | Joseph Bottum
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Dec 21, 2024 | 
freebeacon.com | Joseph Bottum
Christmas burns. It's an inferno that would consume the entire world, if it could: a riot of color and fantastical shapes, like the ballerinas of flame that dance in a fireplace. Just a flicker that starts around November to lick at the season's kindling, building to a blaze by early December, and roaring up into the wildfire of the week before Christmas. It's all too much, isn't it? The lights stapled on the houses, like amateur efforts to guide down to earth the invasion of an alien space fleet.
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Dec 13, 2024 | 
washingtonexaminer.com | Joseph Bottum
The snow came late the year I was 12. At least, that’s how I remember it. A few early winter flurries — more gestures at snow than actual precipitation, like the casual handwaving, the quick prestidigitations that magicians do to get the audience in the mood for the bigger tricks to come — were followed by a pair of November storms soon cleared away in the scrape and rumble of the snowplows.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
acton.org | Joseph Bottum
The trouble with realism is that it’s so unrealistic. Certainly that’s true of realism as a low-rent metaphysics or epistemology, but it’s true even of the word’s most common usages, as a description of a certain kind of foreign policy and a certain kind of political governance. A dark mirror of idealism, realism would have us ignore half of history, half of human motivation, and half of politics. Half of theology, for that matter.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
poemsancientandmodern.substack.com | Edward Thomas |Joseph Bottum
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedToday I thinkOnly with scents, — scents dead leaves yield,And bracken, and wild carrot’s seed,And the square mustard field;Odors that riseWhen the spade wounds the roots of tree,Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,Rhubarb or celery;The smoke’s smell, too,Flowing from where a bonfire burnsThe dead, the waste, the dangerous,And all to sweetness turns.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
poemsancientandmodern.substack.com | Benjamin Myers |Joseph Bottum
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published To find the saplings lanky in the field, awkwardly stretched toward flat, indifferent sun, growing through anthills, sparse grass, and earth peeled bare by high wind; to find the seedlings run down by the mower blade and tossed aside, the piles of brush, cut sycamore and oak, heaped up against the summer’s waxing tide of yellowed grass in air as furred as smoke; is finding something out about almost, not quite, and could...
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Sep 5, 2024 | 
poemsancientandmodern.substack.com | Joseph Bottum
Me: Write heroic couplets about carp. ChatGPT: In the still waters of the pond,Where lilies gently sway and nod,There swims a fish of golden hue,A carp, so graceful, strong and true. . . . Me: Heroic couplets are pentameter. ChatGPT: Yes, that’s correct! Heroic couplets are a form of poetry that consists of two rhymed lines in iambic pentameter. Here is an example of a heroic couplet in iambic pentameter:The fish that swims within the crystal streams,With golden scales and gentle, flowing grace, . . .
