February 28, 2008
Hermit Xian Sound
On John and Tovah Olson’s Inside Inzane Studios podcast blog, each post is its own recording, often a record or tape, often fruit of intense bouts of used record bin […]
February 26, 2008
Associative Reading
As I was flipping around in Saskia Hamilton’s second book Divide These, I was reminded how much I liked this poem: “One Wiser Says to the Other Unwiser” Jot this […]
February 25, 2008
Homage to Javier Bardem
This post is for you, Javier Bardem – you of the dark eyes, substantial neck, and singular profile, portrayer of, among others, a tonsorially challenged killer (No Country for Old […]
February 24, 2008
Is That a Poem in Your Pocket or are You Just Happy to See Me?
April 17th is just under two months away, which means you still have time to choose your poem for the Academy of American Poets “Poem in the Pocket” Day. If […]
February 23, 2008
Private Property and Utopia
A couple of weeks ago, I was blogging on the tension between an ideal of common ownership of property and allowances for private ownership. This tension is one that shows […]
February 22, 2008
Plagiarizing Sean Casey
So I was having some thoughts about Sean’s post from yesterday, on plagiarism, music and the rhetoric of politicians. And I thought that people might want to hear them. And […]
February 21, 2008
Setting Music to Obama
In a college class on modern poetry, the professor, poet and publisher Keith Waldrop, remarked that no one had successfully set Yeats’ poetry to music. There was already enough music […]
February 19, 2008
Vicarious Pleasures
I recently got an email from a popular travel website that raised some perplexing questions for me about (1) this strange beast we call America, (2) the role of fiction […]
February 19, 2008
Searchers for the Fecund Minimum #6
There is a lot to love about Saskia Hamilton’s poems. What I find particularly impressive is how much atmosphere she can create in such a compressed space, which was made […]
February 18, 2008
Poetry is all about playing, and patience
In the mail this weekend came my copy of the California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology for 2007: My Song is the Light. Edited by Mary Lee Gowland, the […]
February 18, 2008
While You’re Busy Making Other Plans…
I was going to write about Tokyo Olympiad, a documentary film on the 1964 games that I saw recently on DVD, and how just when it seemed like an affecting […]
February 16, 2008
My Birthday Week In Review
I turned 43 on Valentine’s Day. Since then, I’ve discovered that Steve Gerber, creator and scribe for Marvel Comics, died at age 60. His masterwork was Howard The Duck, 1970s […]