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 16, 2011
Nonfiction Guides and a Review of Stanton’s Killer Stuff
Several years back I had a conversation with an editor of a lit journal and I mentioned I didn’t read all that much fiction (at least as a % of […]
July 12, 2011
Short Takes: Lions and Tigers and Borges (Oh My!)
Fans of the author of The Aleph can check out an online hypertext version of his lesser-known short story, The Book of Sand, animated and transformed into a puzzle. Think […]
July 4, 2011
KR in the 60’s: “America goes on, goes on”
a whirlwind survey of the Kenyon Review’s final Old Series decade, part of this special summer blog series and a follow-up to these previous surveys of the 40’s AND 50’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 […]
October 29, 2010
You Used To Make Fun Of Things
“And then there is saving laughter,” writes Barbara Guest in Forces of the Imagination. Humor in poetry is release, liberation, wit, awareness, reprieve. And Merwin, our Merwin, is not funny. […]
June 10, 2010
The Sixth Memo
I’ve glanced in the direction of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium from time to time during my year-plus of writing these posts, but I’ve never, until now, […]
May 24, 2010
Salute Him When His Birthday Comes
It’s May 24th, Bob Dylan’s 69th birthday, and I’ve had this collection of Dylan books stacked next to my desk since mid-March. After visiting Minneapolis a couple of months ago, […]
May 21, 2010
Summer Reading Stack
When I was a kid, I knew summer vacation had truly begun when my mom piled us into the fake-wood-paneled station wagon and drove us to the local library. I’d […]
January 25, 2010
Late-January Laurels
A bit over a week ago, Carol Ann Duffy, the British Poet Laureate, jetted over the whale-road and touched down in Michigan. Her university summoners put her quickly to work: […]