June 24, 2012
Riff on Goethe
Versatility is the least of poetic virtues. It may seem an impressive sign of poetic prowess to be able to turn out a poem on any subject, in any of […]
June 12, 2012
Reason Not the Need
I do not need religion. I can plug that hole with anything: family, literature, music, medicine. I can distract myself and go along and never look up and die quite […]
May 27, 2012
Out loud
Through periods of illness I have recently taken to listening to books on tape. I know they’re not “on tape,” but I can’t help but use that phrase: bound by […]
May 15, 2012
Toward New Pasts and Old Futures: an interview with Linda Norton
So-called “alternative” poetics always end up construed as self-conscious investigations into what it means for poems to be poems. This is an important question—one not asked nearly enough—though it need […]
April 27, 2012
James Bond and the Insufficiency of the World
On her Majesty’s Secret Service is one of the best of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, in spite of the fact that he gets married at the end, which […]
March 12, 2012
Self Portrait, Edited: an interview with Dean Rader
The talk these days of electronic mediums dethroning physical ones has taken on an increasingly schizophrenic tone: by some groups, it’s lauded; by others, despised. What both camps can agree […]