Mid-winter evening,
alone at a sushi bar-
just me and this eel

- Billy Collins

It’s important, I feel, to have a favorite poet. It’s adds that important veneer of intellectual sophistication: I don’t just read poetry, I have a taste in poetry! None of that first-come-first-served bring-me-whatever-they’ve-got- ( Read more... )

As previously mentioned, I’ve been suffering from some writer’s block recently, especially when it came to what might be known as “creative writing”, as opposed to this bland pastime we call a blog. I either have words that sound nice but have no meaning, no theme I want to impart with them, or else I decide on a theme and find that no compelling ( Read more... )

    Several months ago, I started reading Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union", an alt-history novel about the Jewish state in Alaska, 1999. It's good - Chabon's a wonderful author - but I stopped after about a hundred pages and moved on, telling myself I'd return to it soon. It was just too full of... schtick, if you'll pardon the ( Read more... )

I am attending a lecture next week by Jennifer Ashton, and this got me reading about Flarf and Spoetry and various other modern and semi-random forms of poetry. Many would argue that these poems are meaningless - after all, how can there be meaning without intent? How can we take random text and presume to find in it meaning supplied by the poet?

( Read more... )

I have never been a big proponent of poetry. I've always favored blunt prose, blunter blogging. Even when cryptic, it is straightforward in its secretiveness. Poetry always seemed too roundabout, too contrived.

So, given this presumptuous predilection, I had no choice but to throw myself headlong into it, taking a class on American Poetry last year ( Read more... )