September 29, 2015
He Looked Again, And Found It Was . . .
A couple of days ago on this blog, Dora Malech wrote: “In poetry workshops and literature courses, I always emphasize poetic turns (not just in sonnets) and the pleasures and […]
September 22, 2015
And Then I Burst Into Tears
Yes, it’s gourd season—but for those of us who teach, it’s also syllabus season and course-packet season. I’ve joked before that I expect to be buried with my course packets; […]
August 31, 2015
Ross, Pynchon, Vonnegut (Part Two)
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Paris Review interview, he calls his books “mosaics of jokes.” (The PR interview, published in 1977, is itself a kind of mosaic; it draws from four different […]
August 30, 2015
Ross, Pynchon, Vonnegut (Part One)
Yesterday, at the end of my discussion of Fran Ross’s Oreo, I promised to do something that I’ll have to do anyway in a couple of months: compare Ross to Thomas […]
August 29, 2015
Fran Ross, Like a Boss
In her foreword to the first reissue of Fran Ross’s Oreo, Harryette Mullen writes, “With its mix of vernacular dialects, bilingual and ethnic humor, inside jokes, neologisms, verbal quirks, and […]
July 31, 2015
Milo Forever
One of the nice but sort of odd things about being a KR blogger is that I can write about nearly anything I want. If I find myself at a […]
July 28, 2015
Doctorow
I picked up a first edition of E. L. Doctorow’s Lives of the Poets last summer in a small town in northern Michigan. I had followed a sign pointing to […]
July 9, 2015
James Tate: A Coda
In the spring of 1991, after a series of aimless months in Baltimore, I was getting ready to move: either to Seattle or to Fayetteville, Arkansas, for graduate school. I […]
June 30, 2015
Midsummer, Memory
What do you remember from age four and a half? Anything? Most of my memories begin around age five—and even those are few and fleeting. My earliest memory is one […]
June 25, 2015
Pure Applesauce
When President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, I wrote a silly jingle to commemorate the moment. Today, the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of […]
June 18, 2015
Larkin, Cornered
On a day that could use some (possibly) bright news, there’s this: Philip Larkin will be getting a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. He’ll be in fine company: […]
May 31, 2015
Walter
Not too long ago, a couple moved into a house near mine. They have a son named Walter who’s maybe two years old—and, as of a few weeks ago, they […]