Steel Wagstaff

Trying to do good things for good reasons

Category: Favorite People

  • The last years of J.B. Jackson

    Passages from William Langewiesche’s Inside the Sky interspersed with quotations from John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s own writing on landscape. Normally typeset passages from Langewiesche, block quotes from Jackson. *    *    * To his neighbors he was known simply as John, a patron of the community, yes, but also a profane and wizened old man who…

  • Belle Waring

    Belle Waring

    I can’t remember exactly when I first read Belle Waring’s poems. It probably would have been at least a decade ago, and I do remember that it was one of her poems about nursing, maybe even “It Was My First Nursing Job”. What I remember most was feeling that I had discovered a voice that…

  • Cesare Pavese

    Cesare Pavese

    I just finished Geoffrey Brock’s translation of Cesare Pavese’s poetry: Disaffection: Complete Poems 1930-1950. It was outstanding. I think I had been vaguely aware of Pavese as a 20th century giant of Italian literature, but I had never read anything by or about him, apart from some long forgotten praise by Phil Levine, who was…

  • The Objectivists: Carl Rakosi

    I’ve spent the last two weeks getting serious about my dissertation. It’s been two years now since I successfully completed my prelim exams, and I have almost nothing to show for that time, dissertation-wise. It’s tremendously embarrassing, and even a little painful. By getting serious, I mean that I’ve been diving into the primary sources…

  • George Oppen

    I will try to keep this post brief, and being brief, it will certainly fail to capture the depth and breadth of my admiration for George Oppen as a poet and a human being, but I feel the need to essay–to make an attempt. I’ve just finished, this evening, a thorough reading of Oppen’s Selected…

  • Lorine Niedecker and the 99%

    One my favorite poets ever was Lorine Niedecker, a remarkable woman who spent most of her life living and writing on Blackhawk Island on the Rock River, just outside of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. At her death, she left behind a little library (including her now infamous ‘Immortal Cupboard‘, which consisted of, among other things, her…

  • Bill Bryson

    This is an odd choice, admittedly, for the Favorite Artists series I’ve started here on this blog. It’s not much of a series yet, to be honest, since I’ve only featured one other artist so far, documentary poet Mark Nowak. And Bill Bryson, while a cracking writer of popular non-fiction, isn’t exactly what many people…

  • Mark Nowak

    Mark Nowak

    So, among other things, I’m going to start on ongoing series of features on this blog, one of which will be posts about my favorite artists, called, appropriately enough, “My Favorite People Series.” This post is the first in what I hope will be a long line of posts about all kinds of people that I admire…