Superbowl Sunday Poetry Touchdown

Brenda Shaughnessy, Wayne Miller, and Craig Morgan Teicher (me!)
read poems
this sunday, 2/4, at 5pm
Speakeasy @ The Bitter End
147 Bleecker between Thompson and LaGuardia

The superbowl is boring. Football is boring. Everything but poetry is boring.

--

Once again I acknowledge my laziness. I was away for the holidays, at MacDowell, where I wrote a heap, and then am just now getting organized again.

But I still like my new format idea, so here goes a reading list. Lately, I've been reading:

*Several books, some out of print, by Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop (who are both truly brilliant writers)
Rosemarie
-WHEN THEY HAVE SENSES(Burning Deck)
-CURVES TO THE APPLE(New Directions) [this is really one of the best books of poetic writing I can think of. I didn't get her before. Now I can't get over her.]
Keith
-THE SPACE OF HALF AN HOUR(Burning Deck) [this is amazing--the poem "Elegy" is perfect.]
-THE REAL SUBJECT (Omnidawn) [A strange book, musings on books and anything else hung on the scaffolding of a character. ]

*Peter Gizzi
-all of his old books, and his new book
-THE OUTERNATIONALE, due out next month. Check it out.

*Sylvia Plath
-The new version of ARIEL
-COMPLETE DIARIES

*Ted Hughes
-THE BIRTHDAY LETTERS

*Phillip Roth
-PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT [this book is not the stunning thing I imagined it would be, but it's engrossing, and, as a Jew who grew up near where the book is set, I can't help but find much of it familiar.]

*Joan Acocella
-TWENTY EIGHT ARTISTS AND TWO SAINTS (Pantheon) [This is one of the most pleasurable books I have read in a long time. It's just out. Go buy it. It's essays, book and dance pieces. Acocella (the dance and book critic for The New Yorker) writes alost pure insight. She writes things like this, which I just can't get over: "...it's a species of sentimentality to think that the end of something tells the truth about it."