February 7, 2017
Notes on BANANA PALACE or Fourteen Ways of Looking at Dana Levin
1. Toward the end of Dana Levin’s remarkable book of poems Banana Palace, a poem entitled “At the End of My Hours” closes its first section like this: . . . […]
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 […]
May 7, 2015
How the West Inverted its Literary Values
In a true missing-the-forest-for-the-trees phenomenon, modern literary criticism has left unremarked, to my knowledge at least, the totally anomalous body of “great literature” that has come out of Europe and […]
September 5, 2014
Political Poetry
Should poets speak truth to power? Is it their role to court censorship, to call out social injustices, to commentate, to dare reveal political iniquity for what it is […]
January 4, 2014
Esoteric and Exoteric: On Dickinson and Shakespeare
When I go back into my own archives—old floppy disks, ancient dot-matrix printouts off an Apple II GS—I find that my earliest poetry (written in my mid-teens) falls into two […]
September 2, 2013
Drug Culture and the Nature of an Elect
To “open the doors of perception,” to recognize the futility of getting and spending and focus on experiencing the moment, to access superhuman reserves of strength or love—such are […]
August 18, 2013
Video Games and Religion
A worldwide majority of people have claimed, for centuries, that they believe in, and want to go to, heaven. Whether heaven exists has always been a matter of debate, but […]
July 6, 2013
“Deeply and Irreverently”: How and What to Read
One of the usual defenses of reading widely in the Western tradition (or, say, in 20th century poetry) is that it improves your writing—that it’s the legwork necessary for the […]
June 30, 2013
The Lost Books of Lord Byron
I have read somewhere that you cannot read in dreams, that there is some neurological block against processing written language. I don’t remember where, maybe in a dream. Because I […]
February 13, 2013
The Abundance: OneWorld (UK) Q & A excerpt
Not to plug my own forthcoming second novel, but–aw, why the hell not? THE ABUNDANCE is coming out from Holt/Metropolitan on March 5, 2012, and from OneWorld in the UK […]
October 25, 2012
Politics, erasure, and a ‘sometimes genuine music’
The question I want to ask is whether or not the act of erasure produces another voice—if the process of effacing (or defacing, as such may be a more accurate […]
July 5, 2012
Public Confession: I Covet Terza Rima
Of all the rhyme schemes out there, the one I covet is terza rima, verse’s triple-double, the braided tercet. I suspect I love its interlock, its trinities that couple […]