Germany, 1636: Moving Through It

Germany, 1636: Moving Through It

The Rhineland, 1636The Thirty Years War had been running for eighteen years by the time I was moving through the Rhineland in the winter of 1636. A third of the German population was dead or had fled or was in the process of dying. I have seen other wars. This one had...
Why Holy War Cannot Be Metaphor

Why Holy War Cannot Be Metaphor

Present Day, July 4, 2026Some listeners will hear Holy War and experience it as a historical document, a meditation on something that happened in other centuries to other people. I understand why. History provides distance. Distance provides comfort.I am writing this...
The Room Where Keats Is Dying

The Room Where Keats Is Dying

Rome, February 3, 1821He arrived last September from England already pale, already carrying the news of himself in the color of his face. The rooms on the Spanish Steps are small. The English physician Joseph Severn has been with him through the worst of it. I am not...
The Day Both Songs Arrived

The Day Both Songs Arrived

Present Day, July 2, 2026I Am Crying and Holy War are in the world now. Two testimonies that belong together, that I kept together when the release schedule shifted rather than separate them, because they are the two sides of the same fact: what the thing witnessed...
The Most Accurate Thing I Have Seen on Canvas

The Most Accurate Thing I Have Seen on Canvas

Paris, June 1937Guernica is hanging at the Spanish Pavilion of the International Exposition on the Champ de Mars. I stood in front of it for two hours today. I have been in enough wars to have personal reference points for what this painting documents.Picasso has not...
The Feast That Is Never Satisfied

The Feast That Is Never Satisfied

Florence, 1474, and presentRinaldo was not an evil man in any simple sense. He was a man who had learned, within the institution that raised him, that certain things were his by right of his position: the deference of everyone below him in the hierarchy, the right to...