ARBOR VITAE, An essay from Remembering the Alchemists
“Trees are Earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.” — Rabindranath Tagore My neighbor across the street wants to cut down the tree in the front of her house; she says its roots are compromising her foundation, and besides, she wants more sun so she can grow flowers in her front […]
Inter-Review
The Intimacy of The Personal essay Richard Hoffman and Steven Harvey Steven Harvey, The Beloved Republic Wandering Aengus Press, 2023. 228 Pages, Paper, $20.00 Richard Hoffman, Remembering the Alchemists The Humble Essayist Press, 2023. 270 Pages, Paper, $19.00. Richard Hoffman [RH]: I’m eager to talk with you about our two books in relation […]
I thought of this poem almost as many times this week as children died of starvation in Gaza
“SO WHAT” Here is a tiny weapon, devastating, undetectable. Here is the switch to turn off the world. The demise of an ancient question; the voice no longer rises, and a black hole, antimatter, widens like a desperate pupil in the sudden dark.
Backtalk & Backlash
I’m including here, in its entirety, this essay about memoir, from Remembering the Alchemists: BACKTALK AND BACKLASH: The Aims, Impact, and Value of Memoir “To employ a textual structure which cracks wide open the whole literary convention of an age seems in more than one case to be the only means by which truth and […]
Mosab Abu Toha update
It appears that Mosab and his family have crossed into Egypt and safety. A great relief.
D(r)one, from People Once Real, 2023
D(r)one What was done was donein our names; we ourselves would never have donewhat was done to anyone. We wanted to be good,polite, obedient, fun, wanted only not to needto ask What have we done? And yet, in our names,what was done was done.
I wish the world were different, but… here is section 12 of “Mundus et Infans” from People Once Real, 2023
12. SEER In Euripedes’ dour version,Artemis, to whom men prayfor permission to kill wildcreatures of her forests, spirits Iphigenia away to Tauriswhere she makes prophecyof the single thing she knows,denied by all who seek her: children will be sacrificedfor advantage, for victory.What she knows is always so.It’s almost too easy. Almost. Hardest are the armored […]
Another bit of commentary, from Emblem, 2011
BEST PICTURE Everyone agreed, it was the greatest movie of the year,comprised of footage of thousands of separate eventsrun backward, to a sound track of simple birdsong. World leaders who had stormed out of meetingafter meeting expertly retraced their steps, backwardswith a little bounce in contrapuntal rhythmto their previous aggressive certainty. Scene after scene of […]
Again, in heartbreak. This is a poem from Emblem, 2011
After Guernica we believed we’d seen it and seen itclearly: sociopathy and its rationale,the need of the state, protection racketthat gives the bullies not only somethingto do, but something to do withoutaccount, with impunity. Over the doornot the blood of the lamb but the wordWAR: so that now in that house deathis welcome, invited, as […]
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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