This long essay, in many short parts, is an attempt to explain what readers of literature, and especially of poetry, should know about what happens in the sky, especially at night. It is often important to get the sky right in order to get the poem right.

A list of about 200 words or phrases from the domain of poetry, from “poetry” itself to “rhyme,” “metaphor,” and “haiku,” and where the words came from. Their genealogies are often curious and surprising.

A brief defense of the so-called “Oxford” comma. It is never wrong to put it in, and it is sometimes wrong to leave it out; therefore, always put it in.

This is a Greek phrase meaning “things said once.” Scholars use it, for example, to refer to words in Homer that occur only once, and whose meanings are therefore often obscure. Two old schoolmates and I have concocted a list of new words in (more or less) English, and we’ve been calling them hapaxes. They’re meant to be funny, but a few of them, such as “generocide,” have turned out to be useful, alas.