August 12, 2011
Welcome to Atlanta
My grandmother’s table always has enough food for two or three times the number of people at the table, a legacy, I’m told, from the days when my great-grandparents ran […]
August 4, 2011
Poetry in Motion?
1600 miles gives one a lot of time to think. One thinks about a lot of things–about the lack of herbage or the surfeit of it, how few or how […]
July 27, 2011
Zyxt: Elegy for a Dictionary, Paean to Dictionaries
I am saying goodbye. I am saying goodbye to Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, which I was required to buy when I enrolled in Jim McKelly’s ENGL 104 English Composition […]
July 20, 2011
Self-Portrait as Library
This week, in the course of blogging for Best American Poetry, I stumbled into the self-portrait again, proposing that one’s books–one’s bookshelf, one’s library–create a kind of self-portrait. Of course, […]
July 11, 2011
As far as you can throw them: disjecta membra on self-portraits and the ken of similes
Maybe, as Charles Wright says, a poem is always a self-portrait, though what exactly that means for the poem’s shape, or the way it treats its reader, is less than […]
July 5, 2011
More on the Self-Portrait: Self-Portrait as Ekphrasis, Ekphrasis as Refraction, Refraction as Reflection
Last week, writing about the self-portrait, when I speculated parenthetically that the self-portrait poem may be a kind of ekphrastic poem, I had two things in mind. The first was […]
July 1, 2011
A Divagation on the Self-Portrait
It’s hard for me to come to a poem like Adam Zagajewski’s “Self-Portrait” (included in the latest issue of The Kenyon Review) without thinking of those lines from Charles Wright’s […]
June 25, 2011
D-I-Y; or, Meta- Not Mono-
After a long day of apartment hunting in a city I don’t know as well as I should, I’m lucky enough to sit down to a round of Old Fashioneds […]
June 17, 2011
Multiple-Copy, Burning-House, and First-Grab Books & First-Bought Books Revisited
Last week, I wrote about the first book I remember buying, a copy of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems, which accompanied me in my stutter-step from student of architecture to student […]
June 9, 2011
The First Book of Poems
There’s a lot to be asked, and a lot to be said, about a poet’s first book. Poets can agonize over whether to go one way or another, whether to […]
June 2, 2011
A Double Exposure: A Roll On Poetry & Photography
Last Saturday, I sandbagged my preparations to drive into the mountains with my wife for the holiday weekend. The FedEx truck would soon arrive and disgorge a box, which would […]
May 27, 2011
Post Beginning With a Line from Mark Irwin
Time’s a game of catch and pitch, Irwin writes in “Elegy” in the Winter 2011 issue Kenyon Review. The line haunts as I read Irwin’s “Poem Beginning With a Line […]