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“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” William Carlos Williams wrote, rather famously. Still, there are many experiences and parts of the world I know, however inexactly, only from learning about them in...

When you think of Ann Arbor’s music scene, classic jazz bands might not be the first thing to come to mind. But by any measure we’d have to rank as some kind of stronghold. You can hear jazz in styles ranging from...

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. What about when a book has no cover, or does not resemble a book at all? This is just one of the questions posed by the exhibit Open Book: An International Survey of...

American songwriter Peter Karp and Canadian-born blueswoman Sue Foley struck up a correspondence–by letter, which is news in itself. “As time went on,” their website says, “the letters they shared became...

That was the question after a Detroit Symphony Orchestra Sunday afternoon concert. In the course of a lovely reading of the finale of Beethoven’s lyrical Fourth Piano Concerto, a single solo cellist sung out below pianist...

Warning: I feel as if just about any descriptive noun I might use while discussing Anne Carson’s new “book”–Nox (Latin for night)–should be in quotation marks. “Poetry,”...

My children and I walk up the beautiful wooden staircase to the hidden second-floor cafe–well known around town as the place to bring a secret date for a discreet cup of tea, up off the street and away from random friends...

In recent years jazz has fragmented into many pseudo-movements. Some of the best players on the scene, however, have refused to wear stylistic blinkers and have created new approaches by openly embracing many elements from the...