Vietnam Seems Far Away

Vietnam seems very far away at the moment. It’s below zero here and I’ve been running for ten days to catch up from . . . being in Vietnam. In a few days’ time I’ve gone from the leisurely life of a poet in a tropical clime to being a professor of literature living beside a frozen [...]

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
the Western reader really [...]

National Banned Book Week

The last week in September in the US is designated National Banned Book Week by the National Library Association. It ought to be every writer’s ambition to write a book considered subversive enough to be banned. This week the Word A Day folks are devoting their space to words having to do with censorship.
More on banned [...]

Health Care

I always like these occasional features in the NY Times Sunday Magazine about a mysterious medical diagnosis. This account, though, seemed particularly relevant at a time when the country is debating health care reform. [Spoiler alert] The patient, a sixty-four year old woman who is pretty clearly from the working class, loses her ability to [...]

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 [...]

Convocation

Clarkson held its Convocation — our opening ceremony — last night and I marched in with the rest of the faculty (to bagpipes blaring!)  wearing full academic regalia, something I never did until I came to Clarkson, where they bought my gown and hood for me when I received tenure. The speaker was James Ransom, [...]

Stretching

This is not the kind of poetry I usually like, but I like this very much. Pam Brown takes the world apart with her language. Reminds me of my old teacher Ronald Johnson.

Reading the American Pragmatists

For the last couple of weeks I have been rereading Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, a work of intellectual biography that treats Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, and Charles Sanders Pierce, within their social and intellectual context. It’s a wonderful book that holds up well to a second reading and this time I have [...]

Fine Writing

And not in a good way. It’s a shame to obscure the work of Edward Hopper with a haze of purple prose.

The Color of Rain

It has been a very wet summer. Looking out my study window, I’ve seen a lot of rain. Light rain and heavy rain and various rains in between. In poetry, I have always been attracted to description, but also suspicious of it, knowing the limits of language. In my own poems and it the work [...]

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