Summer Course: Modern American Poetry

I’m getting ready to teach an online course, Modern American Poetry. The course requires junior standing and at least one previous literature class, but it is open to all majors. That is, I think I can expect a certain amount of reading savvy and engagement with the material, but not a lot of background in [...]

Reading at SUNY Farmingdale

I’ll be giving a poetry reading at SUNY Farmingdale (in the Paumanok Poetry Series) at 11:00 on Thursday. Haven’t done a reading in a long time & I’m a little nervous. After the reading on Long Island, I’m going to spend my honorarium staying a couple of days in NYC going to bookstores, galleries, etc. [...]

Song: On Hearing That the Obama Administration Intends to Cut the Budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities

Song The fuck you say? Two hundred million (or whatever it is) won’t keep the Marines in bullets for a day. The fuck you say? The Pentagon won’t deign to wipe its ass with anything less than a couple billion. The fuck you say? An ancient master noted: All things are empty, true, but differences still count. [...]

Teaching as Seeing

I’m teaching a five-week Saturday morning class for local high school students on “creativity and imagination.” I’ve got a great group of thirteen teenagers who have self-selected or been encouraged by a guidance counselor to take this class in “creativity and imagination” and they seem engaged and happy to take part, though many are shy [...]

Christmas in Hanoi

Sometimes the world hands you a gift. I just found out that I will be spending Christmas and the first ten days of the new year in Hanoi. I’ve been invited to participate in a conference on the translation of Vietnamese literature and its reception abroad, mostly in the English-speaking world. When I came back [...]

Gaston Bachelard, By Chance

I was reshelving a book in my office and noticed a volume on the shelf that I hadn’t picked up in a couple of years– a collection of selections from the work of Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (edited by Collette Gaudin). I remembered being disappointed when I first got the book that it [...]

Haiku

Haiku in translation often require a fairly extensive set of notes or even scholarly apparatus in order for the reader to “get” the insight payoff that is the point of the form. For instance,  in this poem by Kikaku (1661 – 1707) At a grass hut I eat smartweed – I’m that kind of firefly [...]

Attacking the Rationalists

In the winter of 1906-1907, William James delivered a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston on the subject of pragmatism. They were, in many ways, the culmination of a lifetime of work (James would die only two years later) and they also have the virtue of what can only be called voice [...]

Noted

1. Ed Mycue has a new chapbook I’m looking forward to reading, I Am a Fact, Not a Fiction. 2. I have just received my copy of Visiting Wallace, an anthology of poems inspired by the life and work of Wallace Stevens, and in which I have a poem. I am particularly gratified by this [...]

Ekleksographia

Ekleksographia is a very cool new online poetry publication. And I’m not just saying that because my friend Anny Ballardini has selected some work of mine to appear in the forthcoming issue. The inimitable Jesse Glass of Ahadada Books is the spirit behind the effort and as with all his projects, Ek (as I am [...]

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