Have you read this book? Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1950 (Wesleyan Poetry) by Melissa Kwasny (Editor) And what did you think of it? I met Melissa five years ago in Missoula. I got to visit her classrooms, and she’s a very wonderful teacher. Since then, I hear that she… Continue reading oPen 15
Category: Books
We want poetry that goes too far.
Nothing like a great manifesto, I always say. I was perusing the website for ActionBooks today and was charmed by their tag line: We want poetry that goes too far. I’m looking forward to the publication of their first three books this fall. namely: The Hounds of No by Laura Glenum, Remainland by Aase Berg,… Continue reading We want poetry that goes too far.
In the Absent Everyday
In the Absent Everyday by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa caught my eye at the AWP book fair, and I’m really enjoying these poems. Dhompa is a Tibetan-American poet writing in English. This is the second volume that Apogee Press has published of her work. City of Tin Politeness prohibits saying what I really think. Viaduct: a… Continue reading In the Absent Everyday
New Acquisitions
Good trip. Glad to be home. Listed below are the acquisitions of the week, a.k.a. more or less, what I picked up at AWP: Dan Beachy-Quick, Spell Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, In the absent everyday Kathleen Fraser, Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling Peter Markus, The Moon is a Lighthouse Sandra Miller, oriflamme Randall Watson, The Sleep… Continue reading New Acquisitions
And Now I Take a Break
Taking a break for the aWP Conference in Vancouver. For my airplane reading, I’m toting books by Tony Tost and Lyn Hejinian. Could it be true that there are no panels on poetry blogs at the conference this year? I will be on or at all the WITS panels on Thursday. Hope to meet some… Continue reading And Now I Take a Break
The $%#*@#! Stick
Oh, how I yearn for the days when I used pathetic AOL, and my friend Stuart’s emails to me always bounced back to him! Because he has passed the dreaded STICK on to me. I thought I’d avoided this most literary of viruses, but NO, once again, here is the stick. I believe I will… Continue reading The $%#*@#! Stick
Just Checking In
This week has been a busy one. In the off-hours, I’ve been rereading lots of high-spirited poems by Lisa Jarnot and The Waves by Virginia Woolf. I wrote a poem with a whole bunch of numbers in it. That can be very satisfying, as you well know.
Hey Aqualung
I’m on a literary nonfiction kick lately. Could you recommend a favorite book or two or three? Thanks.
The Blur of Days
Another cloudy, blurry day, cold by Houston standards. To post this painting by Tanguy is a bald-faced attempt to romanticize the weather. But then what is weather for, if not for that? Enjoyed chatting with poet-friend Lauren over lunch. She talked a lot about couplets, a form that she’s never used in a poem, but… Continue reading The Blur of Days
Go Tell It
Did you read anything lately that you would recommend to the rest of us? I really like Goest by Cole Swensen. I want to write more about it when I get a chance.
The Lives of the Poets
In December Jeff wrote a comment on this blog about his reading plans for the winter break. I’d been meaning to write something about the biographies of poets, and his comment came at a very welcome moment: I have insane reading habits that come with doing scholarship (like reading about twenty books at once), but… Continue reading The Lives of the Poets
The Starry Nights
What are you planning to read during the winter break? I usually have some ambitious plan up my proverbial sleeve. One year I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which remains a favorite novel of mine. It just so happens that I had a broken leg at the time. That figures into the narrative in… Continue reading The Starry Nights
Twinkle, Twinkle / Tyger, Tyger
I haven’t discussed it so much on this blog because I have another one, an alter ego blog about all things family, but I am a fairly new mom. My daughter, now 8 months old, is getting to be a lot of fun. We’ve been reading aloud to her since she was an embryo. We’ve… Continue reading Twinkle, Twinkle / Tyger, Tyger
Re: Rereading
Again I find myself in the rereading mode. I often am more enthusiastic about reading books that are new to me. Discovery mode. This week I seem to be happily revisiting friends from the past. Tonight it’s Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated. You create yourself in ever-changing shapes that rose from the stuff of our… Continue reading Re: Rereading
100,000,000,000,000 Poems by Raymond Queneau
Rereading the Oulipo Compendium tonight. Here are some lines that caught my eye. They’re from Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems. The poems of this sequence are sonnets–of a sort. The lines of these sonnets are interchangeable. In other words, line 11 of any sonnet could be exchanged with line 11 of any of the other sonnets in… Continue reading 100,000,000,000,000 Poems by Raymond Queneau
Robin Reagler 