January 10, 2008
Yours, Mine and Ours
Slate has an interesting piece today by Tim Wu on J.K. Rowling’s copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon and their plan to publish a fan-written guide to the Potter […]
January 10, 2008
Heralding the Ohio Arts Council
I know Thanksgiving is in November, but friends have recently asked: how does KR do what it does? There are a bevy of reasons. But here’s a partial answer and […]
January 10, 2008
Forced Exposure
“Fred Frith’s Guitar Solos totally blew my ass outta my slacks.” –Byron Coley Critics seldom mention their own buttocks. I don’t understand why. A literary work capable of sending a […]
January 8, 2008
Searchers for the Fecund Minimum #4
Fellow KR blogger Jessica Johnson, in her comments on my last post, has drawn my attention back to Charles Wright’s poem “Bygones”: The rain has stopped falling asleep on its […]
January 7, 2008
Earth and World
A few years ago my husband and I were at a party, and the conversation turned to poetry. After we were outed as writers, a fellow guest said how much […]
January 6, 2008
Wandering in the Open Field
I love the way minds make connections. Here I am reading my “How to Write” books, and I came across a William Carlos Williams essay: Poetry as a Field of […]
January 5, 2008
What’s Wrong With Simply Teaching Reading as Reading?
For some reason, educators seem to be obsessed with changing reading into something more (dare I say) “exciting” for children. According to this New York Times article, comic book ???academies’ […]
January 4, 2008
On Cryptotypes
You know the feeling of encountering an unrefutable objection to an idea you hold dear? It’s not pleasant. Steven Pinker‘s new book, The Stuff of Thought, so thoroughly dismantles the […]
January 3, 2008
How Do You Write?
Reading Kirsten’s wonderful piece on the seductions of “how to write” books, I couldn’t help wondering how many of us follow the advice offered in these manuals: Write first-thing in […]
January 3, 2008
Polis is This
At home for Christmas, I picked up a 1971 issue of The Massachusetts Review, with a special “Gathering for Charles Olson.” In one of the gathering’s pieces, “Charles Olson: A […]
January 2, 2008
Searchers For The Fecund Minimum #3
When you read a short poem, does time speed up or go slower? Does the micro scale of a short poem make you concentrate on each word, making them seem […]
January 1, 2008
Writers write, right? Right.
Despite my “hey, we writers don’t need resolutions!” I found myself clutching my bookstore gift card and perusing the “writing books” aisle on New Year’s Eve. There are so many […]