An aspirational list (of future posts?) of things that have swirled through my mind lately, in an effort to put them into words and perhaps spur them into a greater potential for realization:

• I'm interested in reading a biography of Ezra Pound. A good one, that talks about the work and delves into who he was. It should be an interesting biography, ( Read more... )

I talked to my students on Tuesday about Billy Collins' poem, "Introduction to Poetry." I like the poem because it talks about how to approach poetry. In fact there are six metaphors in the poem about poetry or how to read poetry. The first five are how he would like his students to approach a poem.

1. Reading poetry = holding a color slide up to the ( Read more... )

Searching the Poetry Foundation's website this morning, I found this missive by Stephen Burt on Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's mis-use of Tennyson. "How could a resignation sound so defiant? How could Blagojevich’s speechwriter get this famous poem so wrong?" Burts writes.

The poet Ezra Pound died the year I was born: 1972. By that time, he was a relic. The period of high modernism with which he was indelibly linked was long passed and his reputation was saddled with the more unsavory parts of his personality: his anti-Semitism, his treasonous wartime radio broadcasts from Italy, and his madness ( Read more... )

Via an e-mail from Rattapallax, a New York City lit mag that published one of my poems (and accepted another one, but never got around to publishing it), I find a site for a multi-cultural poetry project scheduled for May called the People's Poetry Project, which has a manifesto modeled after the Declaration of Indepedence, beginning: We hold these ( Read more... )

Tony Hoagland has an essay in this month's Poetry magazine called "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment." I continue to be impressed by the prose coming out of the new Poetry magazine, despite what its detractors say. (The poems are another matter.) In Hoagland's essay, he examines what he calls the "dissociative poem," what he ( Read more... )

Once, in a class in graduate school on James Merrill, someone proclaimed that what was refreshing about Merrill was that he wrote about his life, but it wasn't "confessional poetry." I thought that was an odd thing to say. Now, the label of "confessional poetry" was something that was originally meant derisively and it's understandable why people ( Read more... )

"Free (Market) Verse" by Steve Evans is a forthcoming essay from The Baffler, the literary magazine that Thomas Frank (of What's the Matter With Kansas? fame) is affiliated with. I found it on an experimental poetry listserve in a thread on "Flarf" -- a way of constructing poems using Google. In the essay, Evans links together a cabal of " ( Read more... )

Don't make fun of Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magesteria." It's not nice. I'm thinking of the self-satisfied professor/aetheist guy in the fourth row at the Intelligent Design panel discussion at Hampshire College I attended a few weeks ago. I'm thinking of him today, after reading a book review that will be in this week's Valley Advocate ( Read more... )

A few years ago, I read the book Wittgenstein's Poker. It was a fascinating read and introduced me to the character of Karl Popper. Ludwig Wittgenstein, I had heard of. I don't know that I've ever read any of his writing, or that I have a very strong grasp on his philosophy, but he has certainly been influential. The book related an incident at ( Read more... )