June 10, 2016
First Person Plural: Part III (Muhammad Ali)
Throughout my last two posts, I’ve been thinking about strength (and complication) in numbers—the first person plural: “We.” In between those posts and this one, the news broke that boxer […]
June 8, 2016
What Life Is All About
Just finished Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Here are four things the sordid, elegant, contemplative, coke-infused pages of this wonderful book made me want to do: […]
June 7, 2016
Poetry is fun, 4 real: On Adam DeGraff’s Wherewithal and Phil Estes’s High Life
For serious writers, writing is worrying about not being read. Although the act in itself has immense power, it’s the proliferation of one’s words beyond herself and her immediate circle […]
June 6, 2016
The Data Mine of Rap
The Raplyzer is a computer program that automatically analyzes rhymes from rap lyrics and ranks rappers according to their Rhyme Factor. Created by Eric Malmi, a doctoral student in Computer […]
June 3, 2016
First Person Plural: Part II
In thinking about poems concerned with a sense of “we”—a first person plural—Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” might come to mind first. Last year, I did some thinking about that […]
June 2, 2016
Coming Alive in Familiar Territory
I was on the phone with a literary magazine editor who had recently accepted one of my stories for publication. The call was drawing to a close when I decided […]
June 1, 2016
First Person Plural: Part I
I keep returning to the first person plural: we—what burdens, questions, complications, and opportunities come from a sense of collective self in poetry (and elsewhere). Even the most introductory sociology or […]
May 31, 2016
Closer Yet He Approaches Us
I’ve made it a habit, from time to time on this blog, to note Whitman’s birthday. The day has come round again; the great gray celebrant is 197 years old. […]
May 30, 2016
Peace is a Bus that Has No Destination
…for history has yet to start and there’s no geography and no other languages. And even better: the war has left its “r” behind and turned into love, so the […]
May 30, 2016
The Books We Keep: Part Two
Getting married ushered in a new stage of dealing with things—beginning with registry gifts. Though I had declared I was not going to change—I was still the same person, same […]
May 29, 2016
Know your state poet laureate: Michael Earl Craig, Montana
I was alerted to the fact that Michael Earl Craig was the current Montana Poet Laureate via a Facebook post by the (great) poet Christopher DeWeese (check out his illuminating […]
May 28, 2016
A Good Immunity is Everything
There might be only us In a room My love and I But that is fine What eyes are left for me Anyway what other eyes are left […]