Jim Morin

Is Donald Trump antichrist? My question is not quite the provocation it will probably sound like to some readers.

The translation of poetry is a vexed business. The task of the poet is to find that frisson between the connotative and the denotative, the space where language’s meaningand language’s soundcome together in a resonance—either harmonic or dissonant—that brings us very near the heart of things. Sense and sound both matter, are, in fact, the matter of a poem. When one is changed, so is the other.

I often wonder what my grandmother—Mamaw, as I called her—would have thought about her grandson becoming Catholic. We used to argue about religion constantly. She was a woman of deep, but completely de-institutionalized, faith. She loved Billy Graham and Donald Ison, a preacher from her home in southeastern Kentucky.