Riga is the capital of the Baltic nation of Latvia. With a population of 625,000, it is the size of Memphis. But it’s a special place unlike any you’ve ever been before. In the first place, the city boasts some 800 buildings in the Art Nouveau (or as the Germans called it, Jugendstil) style of… Continue reading Beautiful Riga
Author: Jay Ruud
Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”
Ally Ang’s “On Being Asked the Question, ‘What Is Your Dream Job?'”
Yvor Winters’ “At the San Francisco Airport”
Vilnius, Lithuania
If you envisage heading for Europe any time soon in a wildly optimistic post-Covid (Ha!) gesture, you may be thinking of London or Paris or Florence. Maybe Oslo, Lisbon, Amsterdam. Vilnius may not pop up in your daydreams. But let me encourage you to think outside the well-worn box. Lithuania is an EU country (using… Continue reading Vilnius, Lithuania
James Tate’s “On the Subject of Doctors”
Douglas Dunn’s “The Kaleidoscope”
W.S. Merwin’s “To Paula in Late Spring”
Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
In Search of Sylvia
by Stacey Margaret Jones Come for the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth and stay for the greatest American poet of the 20th century. That was my guiding principle on our June trip to the United Kingdom, where we arrived to see the Trooping of the Colour (and get great photos of the Cambridge kids as… Continue reading In Search of Sylvia