I have been looking at a particular desk to buy in a SoHo furniture store for more than a year. I return every several weeks to examine the piece, as if, somehow, it might have morphed over that time into the perfect object that I wish it were. That I’ll suddenly discover a secretive drawer or a magnetized nook to hold paperclips.

Rudy, the super, buzzed me on the intercom from the lobby to ask if he could bring Mrs. Goldberg up to my apartment. “She has something to tell you,” he said amid the static of the connection.

I knew then what she had to tell me.

The architect Herbert Beckhard (1926–2003) and I took a drive one Saturday morning after I had begun writing a book in 1993 about the twenty houses he designed with his business partner and mentor, Marcel Breuer. Herb wanted to show me the very place where he had decided to become an architect, where, essentially, his career was conceived.

We converse with ourselves all day. Our body language speaks to us, even about something as specialized as our responses to art. Whatever it says is heard and acted upon.

During my uptown walk along empty Upper East Side streets to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its reopening after five months of being closed, I envisioned myself standing before certain works. It wasn’t until I mounted the Fifth Avenue steps, though, that I knew where I would go first…

I’ve seen it in person and in photos, and I’ve read descriptions, too, of John Keats’ hair as a deep coppery auburn. Wavy more than curly, though lank and darkened following one of his fevered night sweats. A drawing by Keats’ friend Joseph Severn reveals this particular state of his hair, misshapen, scraggily strands plastered to his forehead…

I’ve never been arrested by the police, but I was chased and roughed up by the thought police last summer. That armed force, most prevalent on college campuses and in other intellectual arenas, descended on a group of us, unprovoked, brandishing their sharpest weapons—inferences, assumptions, stock phrases, identity politics—while we were attending an August workshop…

My number 4 train was hurtling north from Union Square at 11 p.m. when it suddenly jolted to a stop, mid tunnel between 33rd Street and Grand Central. From the abrupt way it halted, with a residual ricochet bounce, my fellow passengers and I could tell that we had stopped for reasons that were not…

As of today, I added something to my daily to-do list. I am calling it my DSK errand, which stands for Do Something Kind. Anyone can adopt it. DSK is in response to the pervasive negativity and unkindness of our new president. I was in such genuine existential despair the other day, after reading/hearing his…

Edited Lives The last time I was in a store that sold trophies was probably around 1967 when I might have been with my mother as she picked up awards for the “girls” in her suburban bowling league. That I was able to find a storefront trophy store in midtown Manhattan made me feel as…

On a fall evening, in the library of Casa Italiana, an Italianate-style townhouse owned by New York University, a woman named Mirella Bedarida Shapiro spoke of her grandmother and great grandmother. Her grandmother, Gemma Vitale Servadio, had written eight letters in the spring and summer of 1944 that have survived and that Shapiro had recently…

What I did with my summer vacation is write a poem. Those twelve lines about talking with friends at a dinner are the best record I have of having done something different. No T-shirt or mug, shard of beach glass or whelk matches the souvenir of a finished poem, especially one you get to recite…

The other day, I walked forlornly in the footprints of Saurien. He had left behind just six ten-inch-square rusty shadows seemingly silkscreened to the sidewalk. He had apparently run off, which was not surprising given that he was never leashed to a fence or, in his case, bolted to the sidewalk in front of the…

The pair of professors enter the classroom and sit at opposite ends of the long conference table. One of them, William Logan, the distinguished and notoriously provocative poetry critic (and poet), raises his chair to its highest point, not because he is especially tall, but because he wants to make sure he appears so to the 14 students gathered at the table, I one of them.

When you attend a literary gathering, such as the annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee, as I have this summer, taught by learned professors from all over, one of the common variables that emerge is that of shoes. I live in New York City and even though men no longer snap on…

Everyone who lives in East Lansing tells you to go visit the Broad Art Museum on the Michigan State University campus. They say this either because they are proud of the gleaming steel structure that appears to crouch like an insect poised to pounce on prey along Grand River Parkway or because they…