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April 05, 2014
Fear of Flying
I gave a public performance the other night. It was supposed to be a reading from my recent novel, “The Outside World,” but I thought I’d sneak in a few poems from my “Invisible Dogs” as well. ...
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July 10, 2015On Sports and Writing
Years ago, when applying to MFA Programs, I was asked for a personal essay about my writing and writing influences. Without a shred of irony I stated that my earliest literary influences were televangelists ...
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June 20, 2015
Bravery Through Bestsellers
In a recent cultural comment in The New Yorker, South African-born social anthropologist and writer Ceridwen Dovey investigates whether reading can make us happier. She describes a session with a bibliotherapist ...
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October 20, 2015How Tarot Can Help You with Your Writing
I was 13 the first time I tried to see the future in a playing card.I’d been at the grocery store with my parents, and in the checkout line was a small rack of books. I was immediately drawn to one ...
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April 16, 2014
Puzzle
At the suggestion of a friend, I gave my students a Seamus Heaney poem, “A Personal Helicon,” cut up into a puzzle of words, running the gamut from eight “a’s” to one “you” and “your” ...
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April 07, 2014
Compression
In Stephanie Bolster’s “A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth,” the writing is acutely compressed, each word standing in for what in another poet’s hands might take pages. There’s no room ...
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April 03, 2014
Voice
Maureen McLane’s book, “My Poets,” goes beyond poetics and criticism into a kind of channeling of the poets themselves: her versions of their work, her obsessions with their obsessions. She not ...
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September 10, 2014On Silence
I grew up in a silent house, aside from the times when the silence was punctured with yelling. The crying was always quiet. The children did stay quiet—even when not crying—as best they could, to ...
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April 29, 2015
"A Place in the Sun"
Jane Gregory’s poem articulates exactly my feeling of being in the late afternoon, late April sun today on April 29, 2015:DOOM / MOODIn the dumb mud of attention, dear Judge, mood was everything, up ...
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April 17, 2015
On the Otherwise of a Shipwrecked Singularity
In these posts, I keep gesturing towards a transformable/transformed future, one that with different modes of attention, care, action, and responsibility, could emerge. A future that draws on the activities ...
