Search
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
October 13, 2015
Getting Press: the Questions to Ask About Publicity Before Your Book Is Published
“My last book did not get a single review,” a friend told me last year after the release of his third title. “The publisher didn’t do anything to promote it, and I didn’t have time.”This is, ...
-
April 13, 2015
Thinking with M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!
I thought today I’d write about a text that beautifully, painfully, brilliantly performs some of the affective and political work that I’ve been writing about in past posts: M. NourbeSe Philip’s ...
-
April 15, 2015
Spring in Elsinore
In the beginning of Spring I often think of the very beginning of Hamlet:ACT ISCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle.FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDOBERNARDOWho's there?FRANCISCONay, ...
-
April 26, 2014
The Most Important Skill
Someone asks me what’s the most important skill a poet can have and I start to say the power of observation. The world awaits us with all sorts of small truths that can’t easily be seen. When I lose ...
-
April 23, 2014
More Revision
A friend confesses that he could spend the rest of his life revising a handful of the same poems. One change leads to another. It’s like a glassblower unsure whether to make a swan or a squirrel, the ...
