May 31, 2019
Why American Poets Ought to Translate More Poems
As literary translators go, I am mostly a fraud, and thus beset by a fear that all frauds—from TV psychics to reality TV presidents—share: to be exposed by those who […]
April 2, 2016
Sound and Sensibility: or, How to Make Some Noise
My old high school French workbook carried the title Son et sens, or something very close to that, while my English textbook, in an odd coincidence, was called Sound and […]
December 16, 2013
Smacko, Redux
In Traveling Sprinkler, Nicholson Baker’s sort-of sequel to The Anthologist, poet Paul Chowder turns his attention to drone attacks, and songwriting, and ex-girlfriend wooing. He’s nearly “Fifty Fucking Five,” the […]
August 19, 2013
The Projection of Personality
The tightness or rightness of sentences, images, metaphors, the snapping-together of word and word, phrase and phrase—in other words, the stylistic elements writers spend years perfecting—are useless without the supreme […]