Encouragement

The last three groups of poems I have sent out to journals have come back with the “This is not our standard rejection slip” rejection slip. I guess I should take this as a compliment, especially since I’ve gone quite a while without trying to publish poems, but it feels vaguely patronizing. (That’s not exactly [...]

Checking Things off the List

This morning I finished writing a proposal for a small grant. I also wrote the first sentence of a conference paper that I don’t have to deliver for five weeks. The first sentence is always — well, usually — the hardest.
Now I’m going to print out a bunch of my poems & look at them [...]

Critical Language

I finished my book review, at considerable psychic cost. It will appear in the next issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal. My problem with this sort of criticism is that it seeks to dominate the texts it studies. Though more subtle, I don’t see much functional difference between Blasing’s treatment of lyric poetry & [...]

I’m Working on a Review of Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s Lyric Poetry

I have been struggling with a review of Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s study, Lyric Poetry, for The Wallace Stevens Journal. I have promised the editor I would give him the review Monday & I’ve set aside tomorrow morning to beat my notes into a 1500 word book review. I confess that I have been having a [...]

Summer’s End

Hot today. Went to an orientation meeting with our new students this morning, then came home & finished reading the last (for now) of my Patrick O’Brian novels, which have been this summer’s addiction. I didn’t do much writing this summer, but I finished up several projects around the house — finally got the new [...]

Paul Klee’s Diaries

When I was 17 I had only just discovered modern painting. I had a book of Paul Klee’s paintings that I would pour over & over. It is hard for me to describe the sense of wonder I felt looking at these images. I was also looking at other 20th century painters & reading Modernist [...]

Two Kinds of Poetry

Inspired by Jonathan Mayhew’s naming of a pair of poetic fallacies, I’d like to propose a kind of Klein Bottle paradox of the “lyric I.” In current poetic culture it is fashionable to eschew the first person as gauche & “sincere” in a sense where to be sincere is to be stupid &/or dishonest. Well, [...]

What We Allow

Began reading Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul, finding the style a little excessive, a little faux-Pynchon & tedious, overwrought. And yet, I also feel a sense of regard for an artist letting it fly, rolling it out, playing language like a cheap guitar. And, self-consciously, I can’t help wondering as I read where my own [...]

Safety & the Imagination

There is a very good article by Elizabeth Redden at Inside Higher Ed yesterday on the threat of violence in creative writing classrooms. At about the same time as the Virginia Tech massacre, there was an incident (that did not eventuate in violence) at San Jose State. An instructor there, after reading a disturbing story [...]

Today I have Been Wishing I Was Other People

like Steve, who writes Riley Dog, probably the best blog ever because it really isn’t a blog. Or David Wojahn, who has written a smart essay on Bob Dylan & the prospects for American political Poetry in The Writer’s Chronicle. (Not available online, but worth the price of a subscription.) I wouldn’t have minded being [...]

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