Something Like Spring

Haven’t been paying much attention to things online because there has been a lot going on offline. Carole left for Pictoplasma in Berlin today and will be gone a week. I’m only a month away from leaving for Vietnam and I’ll be gone six weeks. And the weather has been (slowly) improving, so there have [...]

Travel Plans

Got my visa for Vietnam yesterday — A big gaudy sticker that takes up a whole page in my passport. The embassy very efficiently turned my application around in three days, so here’s three cheers for the socialist bureaucracy! I’m not leaving for a month yet, but wanted to get this bit of paperwork out [...]

John Banville on Writing

“Civilisation’s greatest single invention is the sentence.” [The rest of Banville's short statement is here.] While I don’t subscribe to the young Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” of language, in which every proposition is a picture of reality, as a writer, I have the strong sense that every sentence is a line thrown out into the world [...]

Teaching the Political Poem

I’m going to be teaching a workshop on the political poem at the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program this summer. As I prepare, I’ve become aware of a presumption in my own thinking that a radical poetics equals a radical politics, but this is clearly not the case. Teasing out the relationship between [...]

Twenty Books: How’s that for Hybrid?

Ron Silliman has been doing top-twenty lists, like this one from Javier Huerta of “top twenty books that made you fall in love with poetry.” Here is my list. I’ve intentionally limited myself to books from the first twenty years or so of my writing life. Maybe I’ll do the latter-day books in a subsequent [...]

Getting it Right by Breaking the Rules

All the books on how to write fiction tell you not to get hung up editing and polishing before you get to the end of the story. I’ve been working on a story for a month now that I don’t really have an ending for and the last couple of days I have been going [...]

The Problem of Pluralism in American Poetry

Are there really only “two traditions” of American poetry, as Ron Silliman says in passing in this blog post? And even if we can sort poets into one of two baskets, what value does the sorting have? And who dies it leave out? Isn’t this a little like saying that there are two traditions in [...]

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