June 8, 2012
Poetry and Entropy
It’s not often that the nuclear radiologist in me shows up on this blog, but Dr. Majmudar—reader of medical images created by measuring positron annihilations and differential tissue attenuation—would like […]
June 6, 2012
The Dorothy project: An interview with Danielle Dutton
Just out today on the Kenyon Review Online is Elaine Bleakney’s review of two novels by Renee Gladman, Event Factory and The Ravickians. Both novels were published by Dorothy, a […]
May 21, 2012
Taking back the sponge cake & other adventures
This post should come with a dateline: Seattle. This weekend I was lucky enough to go to my first reading at the legendary Elliott Bay Books. Four great poets—Zach Savich […]
May 20, 2012
The Reproductive Success of a Poem
There’s more than one way of conceiving of the “success” of a poem; one that’s never talked about is its biological/evolutionary success, that is: How effectively does it replicate itself? […]
May 13, 2012
The Reconquest of the Long Form
There are, by my count, only two things that can save a long poem in English. Heterogeneity (Eliot and Pound; and those polyphonic, formally quite various sustained dramatic poems of […]
May 12, 2012
Writing nature: On Melanie Rae Thon’s “The Voice of the River”
In a recent interview, novelist Lance Olsen describes one of the endeavors of his just-released Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing: I spend one chapter talking about how conventional notions […]
May 10, 2012
Victor Hugo and the Two Tolstoys
One of the keys to Tolstoy is his early admiration of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. The young Tolstoy visited Hugo during a trip to Europe; the young Russian Count read and […]
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 […]
April 23, 2012
The Two Unsurpassable Poems in the English Language
Every successful poem is unsurpassable in its own way. Even a brief rhyme, like— John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone. —cannot be improved upon, repeated, or replicated. It is a […]
April 18, 2012
Literature and home
This past weekend I had the great pleasure of attending the 12th annual Juniper Literary Festival at UMass Amherst. A homecoming of sorts, since I received an MFA from UMass […]
April 6, 2012
“When they rise, it’s as if they were already falling”: On Magdalena Tulli’s “Moving Parts”
Last week I wrote about this year’s Best Translated Book Award and noted a few concerns about the relative lack of women authors in translation. So why not use this […]
April 2, 2012
The Enduring Appeal of Jules Verne
If all Verne had done was predict the future, he would excite my admiration, not my love. How perspicacious the man was! Really ahead of his time! And that’s where […]