Happy Thanksgiving from GW English

Ghosts The first time I saw him he was standing in front of the Iranian embassy with his mother, or with whom I assumed was his mother. She wore a black bonnet like a black flower. He wore a black frock coat and a beige collar high under his chins. His linen was unimpeachable. His…

I. I am a man.  I’ve lived alone.  I’ve been  in  love.  I’ve  played  with  fire, cursed the telephone, and basked in verse, in verve, and also  Humid,     terrestrial,     mixed,     nongenderspecific,   have   occasionally  day’s  tumult  ushers  in   an   evening   with  a  lone    moved  a  woman’s shut   icecream   stand,   false  promises  of  cone  heart,  although …

Our Open House this afternoon brought together a wide variety of English Department community members, everyone from first-year students to graduating seniors, as well as graduate students, alums, and of course faculty. Thanks to all who came! We closed the event with a tribute to Toni Morrison led by Professor Evelyn Schreiber. It was moving…

I first encountered Ogden Nash’s Giant Baby Panda poem settled like a gem in Marianne Moore’s 1944 essay “Feeling in Precision.” In the essay, Moore writes: “Voltaire objected to those who said in enigmas what others had said naturally, and we agree; yet we must have the courage of our peculiarities. What would become of…

The Flying Notebook With its spiraling metal body and white pages for wings my notebook flies over my bed while I sleep— a bird full of quotations and tiny images who loves the night’s dark rooms, glad now to be free of my scrutiny and my pen point. Tomorrow, it will go with me into…