Slicker Chumway's

Cradle Book Virtual Book Tour Stop 1: My Chair

2010-07-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

Welcome to my virtual book tour! I wasn't able to embark on an actual book tour to promote my new collection of stories and fables, Cradle Book, just published by BOA Editions (please buy it--please, please, in print or as a Kindle E-book), so I decided I'd stage this little virtual tour, reading a few fables from various places around my house. Here's the first stop--my favorite chair! Each video features one fable. Thanks for watching!

"The Prisoner"

"The Story of the Stone"

See you at the next stop...

This Game Is Ruining Me

2010-07-26T19:58:00.001-04:00

This is Angry Birds, an iPhone and iPad app where you shoot birds out of a slingshot at green pigs, but you probably know that because it's like the third most popular game in the app store and you have an iPhone and can't stop playing it either. It's all I do. I don't read or talk or anything, and I'm still trying to beat the first group of levels cause I suck at video games.

My Q&A with Thomas Sayers Ellis

2010-07-26T11:39:00.000-04:00

Thomas Sayers Ellis second book, Skin Inc., is coming from Graywolf in September. It's wild, very complicated, and will make you feel conflicted feelings about the state of black identity in America. I did a Q&A with Thomas for today's issue of PW, and here it is, along with a link to the PW review.

My Virtual Cradle Book Book Tour

2010-07-26T09:26:00.000-04:00

As you may or may not know, my second book, a collection of stories and fables called Cradle Book (available in print and in a Kindle-exclusive--how controversial of me--e-book edition) was just published by BOA Editions. The demands of fatherhood having basically prevented me from embarking on an ambitious book tour, or even a small one, for which I feel bad, not just because I'm depriving you of the awesome experience of my readings, but because BOA did me the great good turn of bringing out the book, and I owe it to them to promote the darn thing. Plus, I like reading--it's the last vestige of performance in my life (I did comedy once a upon a time, you see).

So, I've decided to borrow some tricks from Dorothea Lasky, who conduced her virtual Tiny Tour for her first book, and from some video reviews I did for eBookNewser, and do my own little virtual book tour.

Here's the plan: I'll post probably three ten-minute readings--three is enough, I think--in which it'll just be me reading stories from Cradle Book. If anyone bothers to tune it, I think it'll be a smashing success. If not, I'll still have fun making the videos. I'll try to keep 'em lively. These events will be BYOWAC (bring-your-own-wine-and-cheese). I'll try to post the first one tonight or tomorrow. More info and/ or a reading coming soon.

John Taggart's New and Selected

2010-07-26T07:21:00.001-04:00

Wow. I haven't posted on this blog for over a year. Much of that year has been spent working as a paid blogger, so I guess I had my blogging fix. I'm still blogging for work, but now, back at PW, I edit our new blog PWxyz. But maybe here I'll write a bit about some poetry and nonfic books I'm looking forward to.

-

But, on to the cover to the left. This is an upcoming book I'm quite excited about. John Taggart is a poetry stalwart, having plugged away in the trenches of poetry for decades, taking off from Oppen and finding his own way toward a kind of ambient pastoral poetry that's somewhere between Oppen and Bronk. Flood Editions did has last couple of books, and then, surprisingly, Copper Canyon signed him on for this selected poems, Is Music, which is a monumental book. I say it's ambient, meaning the poems don't exactly begin or end, or quite conclude. So to have so many of them together really makes them work, like turning off all the lights and putting on an Eno album. And what a stunning cover! The book was supposed to pub in May but has been delayed, so it's not quite out yet, but should be in stores soon. Look out for it.

The App Boom Hits Publishing

2009-07-06T07:43:00.001-04:00

Check out my article on how mobile phone apps are changing the publishing business, in today's PW.

albums in heavy rotation

2009-06-24T19:55:00.000-04:00

FOLK ART by Joe Lovano Us Five
SOLAS by Masada Quintet feat. Joe Lovano
FROM A COMPOUND EYE by Robert Pollard
MOON: LIVE by Robert Pollard

A Profile of Novelist Chandler Burr

2009-06-01T21:43:00.003-04:00

Here's my profile of Chandler Burr, author of YOU OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU, a new novel I'm very excited about: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6661549.html

Twitter and Publishing

2009-05-18T07:23:00.001-04:00

A story I wrote for Publishers Weekly about how Twitter is changing the publishing business.

laid off

2009-04-25T22:56:00.000-04:00

I was laid off from PW but am still editing PW's poetry section and doing a hell of a lot of freelance reviewing.

Me on FSG's Poetry Month Blog

2009-04-06T14:45:00.003-04:00

FSG's Alyson Sinclair interviewed me for the Farrar, Strauss & Giroux poetry month blog about my work as poetry editor at PW and on the board of the NBCC.

Daniel Mendelson's Cavafy

2009-03-31T16:50:00.001-04:00

I'm very excited about this book. See why:

Che Fece…Il Gran Rifiuto

For certain people there comes a day
when they are called upon to say the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has
the Yes within him at the ready, which he will say

as he advances in honor, in great self-belief.
He who refuses has no second thoughts. Asked
again, he would repeat the No. And nonetheless
that No—so right—defeats him all his life.

--C.P. Cavafy, trans. by Daniel Mendelsohn

A Profile of Poet-Critic Stephen Burt

2009-03-27T07:09:00.003-04:00

Poet-critic Stephen Burt has a new book of essays, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry. I wrote a profile about him and the book for my annual National Poetry Month roundup in Time Out New York. There are also three tiny reviews of new poetry books by Rae Armantrout, Matthew Dickman and Sasha Steensen.

Albums in Heavy Rotation

2009-03-14T07:17:00.003-04:00

INNER URGE, Joe Henderson, Blue Note, 1964
COMPASS, Joshua Redman. Nonesuch, 2009
BACK EAST, Joshua Redman. Nonesuch, 2007
WAY OUT WEST, Sonny Rollins, Fantasy, 195?
HOLD TIME, M. Ward, Merge, 2009
CONNER OBERST, Conner Oberst, Merge, 2008
FOR ALL I CARE, The Bad Plus, Do The Math, 2008
PROG, The Bad Plus, Do The Math, 2007
KICKING TELEVISION:LIVE IN CHICAGO, Wilco, Nonesuch, 2006?

Me on the NBCC

2009-03-13T19:57:00.000-04:00

My term on the board of the National Book Critics Circle begins today. I'm very excited. I was also elected VP in charge of membership, so if you want to join, which you really ought to do, you'll be dealing with me.

jazz

2009-03-10T23:22:00.000-04:00

I've been listening to an obsene amount of jazz lately, just downloading like mad--Brad Mehldau, Joshua Redman, Paul Motian, The Bad Plus, Joe Lovano, Chris Speed, Coung Vu, Jordi Rossy, Chris Cheek--and trying to write about it.

listening

2009-02-27T20:42:00.000-05:00

I tend to alternate between exclusively instrumental and lyric-having music. On a jazz jag now. I love how jazz is all about moments. Even the albums aren't meant to be big deals in themselves--not like rock albums. They're just records of events, to be taken however a listener wants.

2009-02-27T15:32:00.002-05:00

I've become really interested lately in the idea of blogger as a way to communicate with a smeall, predefined group of people--blogs for classes or 4 friends that want to share some particular kind of information. In that situation, the blog becomes a kind of table, and everyone puts their stuff on it and people can look and comment if and whenever they want to.

Video of My University of Chicago Reading

2009-02-23T22:12:00.001-05:00

This is me reading at U of Chicago on 2.18.09. I'm SO HAIRY.

Two More Books I'm Excited About

2009-02-21T07:26:00.002-05:00

PRESENT IMPERFECT by Suzanne Buffam

THE NEST, SWIFT PASSARINE by Dan Beachy-Quick (Tupelo, April 2009)
-I love DBQ's first book, NORTH TRUE, SOUTH BRIGHT, but couldn't quick follow him on the two books about Moby Dick, nor on the last book of poems for Tupelo, but I think I'm back on board with this one.

April

2009-02-20T11:27:00.001-05:00

Back in New York. Had a wonderful time in Chicago...

I'm buried in poetry books. Will someone please explain to me why it helps for all poetry to be PUBLISHED in april? Why can't publishers just promote that month? ugh.

me in Chicago

2009-02-18T11:09:00.000-05:00

The week after awp I find myself in Chicago doing a guest poet gig at u of Chicago. I miss being at a university--makes me feel safe the way hiding I'm a shrub did when I was little.

Me on Starting Today: Poems for Obama's First 100 Days

2009-02-16T10:04:00.002-05:00

Last Wednesday was my day on this amazing blog curated by Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg. They assigned a poet to write a poem for each of Obama's first 100 days in office. Here's my poem. I've been writing lots of poems shaped and rhymed like this lately.

New or Forthcoming Books I'm Excited About

2009-02-15T16:02:00.002-05:00

POETRY

Most are pubbing--you guessed it!--April. Though I bet some were made available early for AWP, where I was not this year.

As If by James Galvin (Copper Canyon, 2009)
-haven't seen a galley of this yet, but I've liked the poems I've seen in mags.

Rising by Farrah Field (Four Way, 2009)
-Farrah is a good friend and a blazing poet.

The End of the West by Michael Dickman (Copper Canyon, 2009)

It is Daylight by Arda Collins (Yale, 2009)

The Plum-Stone Game by Kathleen Jesme (Ahsahta, 2009)

Transcendental Studies by Keith Waldrop (U of California, 2009)

Chronic by D.A. Powell (Graywolf, 2009. Just released)

Collected Poems and Unfinished Poems of C.P. Cavafy, trans. by Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf, 2009--March)

PROSE

The Way Through Doors: A Novel by Jesse Ball (Vintage, 2009)

Close Calls with Nonsense by Stephen Burt (Graywolf, 2009)

The Winter Sun by Fanny Howe (Graywolf, 2009)

Brenda Nominated for NBCC Award

2009-02-15T15:58:00.002-05:00

Brenda Shaughnessy, who is, among many other things, my wife, was nominated for the 2008 Nataional Book Critics Circle Award for her second book, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon, 2008). I'm very excited and I hope you'll all cross your fingers for her.

Just to keep the record straight--I was recently elected to the board of the NBCC, but my term does not start until March 2009, after Brenda's award is decided.

Posting

2009-02-15T00:24:00.002-05:00

So I've been a bad blogger. How many times have I said so on my blog over the last several years. But I'm going to try something new. Thanks to a widget in the new iWeb, I've been able to put this blog's RSS feed on the home page of my website. I'm going to try to use this as a space to post news, as such, and musings when I have them.

"Ultimately Justice Directs Them" selected for Best American Poetry 2009

2009-02-14T23:52:00.002-05:00

I'm very excited and honored to report that guest editor David Wagoner has selected my poem, "Ultimately Justice Directs Them," first published at Notell Motel, for Best American Poetry 2009, to be published by Scribner in September.

Click here for an interview Notell did with me.

Thank you Notell Motel, and Davids Wagoner and Lehman.

Reginald Shepherd 1963-2008

2008-09-12T13:56:00.006-04:00

Reginald Shepherd died two nights ago. I didn't know him well, but I did know him a little bit--we began corresponding about each others poems, met at AWP once or twice, and last spring, he wrote a signed review of Mark Doty's selected poems for me at PW. It seemed to me that he suffered a very great deal and wrung a great deal of life and energy out of his work as a poet. Somehow, I'm shocked and stunned by this news, though it's not really surprising. The US poetry community will notice his absence and miss him. I hope he knew that.

Here is the excellent review he wrote of Mark Doty's book:

Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems Mark Doty. HarperCollins $22.95 (340p) ISBN 978-0-06-075247-7
Signature

Reviewed by Reginald Shepherd

Doty's first book, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. He has published six books of poetry and four memoirs, all excellent, since. This hefty selection from his seven collections, plus a generous sheaf of new poems, should solidify his position as a star of contemporary American poetry.

Doty's poetic career really took off with My Alexandria (1993), his third book, which made his reputation. Fire to Fire contains only two poems from his first two books—“Adonis Theatre,” about an old movie palace turned gay porno theater, and “The Death of Antinous,” about the Roman emperor Hadrian's lover's afterlife in statuary, both of which are meditations on representation, absence and desire. Desire, and its capacity to transform and transfigure, is one of Doty's main themes. Enough desire (so often mixed, as T.S. Eliot wrote, with memory) can make us as beautiful as the objects of our desire.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Doty has never eschewed beauty. Indeed, beauty, its unlikely, often unexpected, yet constant recurrence and its elusive fleetingness, is central, as demonstrated by several new poems titled “Theory of Beauty,” each with a parenthetical specific occasion. Beauty is found everywhere in Doty's poems, in a band playing cast-off chemical drums in Times Square, even in Chet Baker falling from an Amsterdam hotel window: “a blur of buds//breathing in the lindens/and you let go and why not.”

The title poem “Fire to Fire,” from School of the Arts (2005) is a gorgeous meditation on the way that life's fire infuses the world, in sunflowers, goldfinches, and even a neighbor's puppy: “fire longs to meet itself/flaring, longing wants a multiplicity of faces,//branching and branching out.” The selections from “The Vault” (which really needs to be read in its entirety) reveal the poetry in men meeting other men's bodies in a sex club, incorporating references to the Middle English poem “Western Wind” and to James Wright's “A Blessing,” and including a subtle revision of Rilke's “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” in which the men are deep in the club's “mine of souls,” “that shaft where inner and outer//grow indissoluble.”

At times the poems unnecessarily explain what their vivid images and striking phrases makes clear, but the commitment to the particular, and to its possibilities, is unwavering. As Doty writes in “Ararat,” “Any small thing can save you.” The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence, since “desire can make anything into a god.”

When I die and go to heaven

2008-07-01T15:49:00.001-04:00

This is what I want to see for eternity:

Me on Poetry Daily

2008-06-21T07:35:00.003-04:00

Hello everyone and no one,

I'm pleased to draw your attention and browser to the wonderful Poetry Daily website, which, today, Saturday 6/21/08, is featuring the title poem of my book. I'm especially happy they picked the title poem, as it's one I tried for a long time to place, with no success.

Hope all are well.

Jenny Scheinman

2008-06-11T13:40:00.001-04:00

This is a nice piece from the New York Times today about Jenny Scheinman, a jazz violinist and singer with whose work I'm very much taken. She has two new records out.

LA

2008-05-31T23:25:00.003-04:00

Been in Los Angeles this week for the first time for BookExpo America. Picked up some galleys, posting stories on PW's website, smoked in the hotel room, missed B and Cal, and we're bound for good ole NY tomorrow morn. It's about time.

Here are the book I got that I'm excited about:

HOME by Marily Robinson (FSG)
FIREFLY UNDER THE TONGUE by Coral Bracho, trans. by Forest Gander (New Directions)
ISLE OF THE SIGNATORIES by Marjorie Welish (Coffee House)
THE COSMOPOLITAN by Donna Stonecipher (Coffee House)

Also happened to download a ton of music (legally, mind you) during the trip. I think I really just want my blog to be a place I can yammer about my new toys. Here's what I got for music, not that anyone cares:

CROSSING THE FIELD by Jenny Scheinman (Koch Records)
JENNY SCHEINMAN by Jenny Scheinman (Koch Records
GENTLY DISTURBED by Avishai Cohen Trio (Razdaz)
LICORICE AND SMOKE by Jessica Lurie (not sure of label)
THE INKLING by Nels Cline (Cryptogramaphone)
TRIBUTE by Paul Motian (ECM)
ONE AND THE SAME by Jeff Gauthier Goatette (Cryptogramaphone)
THE OTHER SHORE by Cline, Gauthier, Stinson (Cryptogramaphone)

that's a pretty good cross-section of my listening lately: lots of LA and west coast jazz, especially Nels Cline, and some West Coast transfers like Jenny Scheinman, whose new instrumental album, CROSSING THE FIELD, has some of her best tunes yet (though as a whole disc I like 12 SONGS better). I'm still sorting through the self-titled vocal record, and it sounds a lot like Gillian Welch to me, and I'm trying to figure out if Scheinman does this new roots sound as well. I gather she grew up in a musical family in a super-small CA town. The Lurie is great. I know nothing about her, but the band is Nels Cline, Scott Amendola and I think Todd Sickafoos on bass, and Lurie does some great wordless singing, along with her saxing. Motian is an old standby, one of the most interesting players to ever touch a drum kit--he thinks of the drums as textural as well as rhythmic, perhaps leaning harder on the texture than the rhythm.

And that's all from me. Thank god it's back to NY tomorrow.

iPod

2008-05-18T22:04:00.002-04:00

I'm typing this with two fingers on my iPod touch, the toy I bought myself with my book advance. I love this thing--what did we do before iPods and wifi?

--

I've had this blog for like three years. I don't think anyone reads it anymore cause I stopped posting for a long time.

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Going to read Sappho now. Glad to see the iPod autotext has the word Sappho.

Guy Time

2008-05-18T06:53:00.005-04:00

B has been out of town since last saturday and is coming back in 4 days, so I've been taking care of Cal by myself. He's sitting here beside me on his little high chair. It's been hard, and I'm exhausted, but I'm also getting to know him better than I ever have. I'm also pretty starved for adult company.

--

Reading a couple of new/forthcoming poetry books. I wish some were better, and others are good enough. One thing I did like was AJAX translated by John Tipton, from Flood Editions. One of the most stunning book jackets I've ever seen. Never read another translation, so not sure if I liked the play or the version. And then the play was pretty strange--not much happens, lots of talking and weeping, but I think that would be more familiar if I read more Greek drama. Reading Daniel Mendelsohn a few weeks ago got me interested.

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Watched that stupid Bob Dylan movie I'M NOT THERE last night. It just didn't really come together for me. Five versions of Dylan or whatever, five Dylan could-have-beens, or the spirits of America that animated him or our fascination with him. That's dumb. Like anyone else who makes things, Dylan is somebody who writes songs. Really good ones, and he kickstarted two decades of American music. What's most fascinating to me about Dylan is that he's an artist who's stuck it out for five decades, continually making work, and not all of it is good. Much of it isn't. He's sloppy. But he's always checking in, giving us updates in song. MODERN TIMES is a really good record.

--

At night I have lots of time to myself and can't go anywhere. I can't write. I can only write when I have to steal the writing time from other commitments. Ugh.

Publishers Weekly Poetry Issue

2008-03-04T10:39:00.002-05:00

Dear Poetry Types,

this week's PW is our annual Poetry Issue, which means we have two articles about poetry, which I wrote.

The first is called Collected Consciousness, and it's a feature about the collected poems of Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Barbara Guest.

The second, The Poets' Poet, is a profile of Allen Grossman.

If you're looking for something to read, check 'em out.

I'm Reading Tomorrow

2008-02-19T16:49:00.002-05:00

Page Series
National Arts Club
7pm

--

Thoughts that make me happy today:

1) Wife and Son (family)
2) Collected Poems of Charles Reznikoff
3) Things I've ordered and have coming in the mail
4) Things I've ordered and recieved in the mail
5) The Dream of a unified field
6) new eco bottle
7) 8)
8) ipod
9) january software update
10) pipe tobacco
11) friends

Sex

2008-02-08T11:59:00.000-05:00

This is amazing--my friend Woody made his own crazy video for "Tired of Sex" by Weezer:

Fingers dub - Tired of Sex by Weezer from Woods on Vimeo.

Spoils of AWP

2008-02-07T14:13:00.001-05:00

One rather sweet thing I'm seeing other bloggers doing is listing all the books they got at AWP. I think it's sweet because it reminds me I belong to a vast community of object fetishists. That said, here's my list:

1) Matthew Cooperman, DAZE, Salt
2) Matthew Cooperman, A SACRIFICIAL ZINC, Pleiades
3) Julie Doxie, UNDERSLEEP, Octopus
4) Graham Faust, LEAVE THE ROOM TO ITSELF, Ahsahta
5) Robyn Ewing, CHEMICAL WEDDING, CLP
6) Reginald Shepherd, ORPHEUS IN THE BRONX, Univ of Michigan
7) John Ashbery, SELECTED PROSE, Univ of Michigan
8) Paul Hoover, FABLES OF REPRESENTATION, Univ of Michigan
9) Alice Notley, COMING AFTER, Univ. of Michigan
10) Marth Ronk, WHY/WHY NOT, Univ of California
11) Anthony Tognazzini, I CARRY A HAMMER IN MY POCKET FOR OCCASSIONS SUCH AS THESE, BOA

There were a couple of others, I think, that I can't now recall. Ah, what a feast.

Me on Verse Daily!

2007-12-24T09:09:00.000-05:00

Hi all. Hope everyone's having a happy holiday. I'm quite honored to learn that my poem "eye contact" was featured yesterday on "Verse Daily". Thanks! Cal's pissed that I'm typing, so I'd better stop.

2007-11-12T21:13:00.000-05:00

So I had the blog on my personal website for the last several months, and I think nobody could find it, and then I had a baby and I haven't been blogging. But now it's back at good ole' blogger. Will anyone still read me here? I ain't got much to say, I'll admit--new partenthood takes a shitload outta me-but I miss blogging and maybe somebody will stop by.

Hiatus

2007-06-30T19:38:00.000-04:00

As you have most likely figured out, I'm am on hiatus and will be blogging at my usual slow pace later this summer. Hope all is well in your worlds.

2007-06-08T17:15:00.001-04:00

So the baby could come any time now. It's very strange to be waiting like this. Of course, we are scared to shed our current lives, if that's what happens, but I think we also both want to finally see what this new life might be, and we want to meet this person. It's not just a new roommate, it's a new person coming into the world to exist here for the first time. It seems, in a way, like there's no precedent for that, though of course each of us is the precedent.

2007-06-07T16:49:00.000-04:00

Hey,

I've been remiss in not writing for a while. All's well. B and I are about to have a baby, which means there've been many distractions and little time to remember things. Due date is this coming tuesday--june 12th. Holy Cwap!

Was just fussing with Google--they have so many strange programs in the works. Like free web page design and hosting that works a lot like Gmail. I pay a bunch o' money per year for my website. Why? I'm a sucker.

The fine folks at McSweeney's are having a rare (for them) poetry event here in NY on monday at Mo' Pitkins: Ashbery, Bearnstein, and Emanuel. 7pm, 34 Ave A between 2nd and 3rd. It's a celebration for their new book, the McSweeney's book of poets picking poets, which is a reprinted edition of the poetry section of the most recent issue of McSweeney's, to which B, among many other fine poets, is a contributor.

My New Toy

2007-04-29T11:13:00.000-04:00

i've always wanted a website; I don't know why. It just seems like everyone else has one and I want one too. Or it's like a toy that lives everywhere you go. Or maybe I'll have something to say to everyone in the world and will not want to post it on a blog. Or maybe I jus think websites make a person cool and official, like having business cards. Anyway, with my forthcoming book as an excuse, i've set up a website, www.craigmorganteicher.com, and even relocated this blog there. There's more info on this blog right now than there is here, but I'm working on it. I made the page with iWeb on my mac, which is a pretty amazing program. You can do anything these days without doing anything.

Beyond that, I've been reading Robert Frost. And getting ready for the other very big event coming in B and my life in the next few weeks...

2007-04-12T17:40:00.000-04:00

Going to the second night of the PSA Festival of New American Poets tonight. That's really what I'm doing. No joke. I may go have a cigar before. That's what I'm doing too. Someone once wisely said, on this very blog, that blogs should be about what you would write about if you had the time. Then I think I referenced that very comment once before. I feel brain dead. It's the end of a long day of work. This is how I really am, brain dead, at the end, a long day...

Grindhouse

2007-04-10T11:22:00.000-04:00

Have you guys seen this craziness--the new Tarantino/ Rogriguez double feature. It's perhaps the most violent movie ever made, and, in truth, an extraordinary experience of art at its most intense. Go. Go. Go see it!

It's snowing again

2007-04-08T14:50:00.000-04:00

Why is it snowing in April? Why? To whom can I complain in the hopes of getting results?

Thanks to everyone who sent congrats and kind words about my book. I couldn't be happier about it!

So, guess what I'm reading? Bet you can't, so I'll tell you:

I'm on a fable jag, as I've been writing them (look out for a couple of examples in this summer's issues of A PUBLIC SPACE and JUBILAT), so I've been doing my homework, reading

GRIMMS'S FAIRY TALES
AESOPS FABLES
THE BOOK OF FABLES by W.S. Merwin (due out shortly from Copper Canyon--a reissue of two earlier books)
ITALIAN FOLKTALES edited and rewritten by Italo Calvino (this is really good--lots of kings and things getting cut open)

Then, of course, I'm working through many books of poems:

OTHERHOOD by Reginald Shepherd
THE NOVEL by Paul Hoover
SELECTED POEMS by Kenneth Koch (The American Poets Project Edition, just out)
TYRANOSAURUS REX AND THE COURDUROY KID by Simon Armitage (not liking it as much as I hoped I would)

Now it's stopped snowing, and only five minutes have passed....

My First Book

2007-04-04T13:45:00.000-04:00

Here's my big news. I'm stupid excited about it: Paul Hoover picked my manuscript as the winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry. My first book, BRENDA IS IN THE ROOM AND OTHER POEMS, will be published this coming November by the Center for Literary Publishing, who have brought out first books by a whole slew of great writers, among them Steven Burt, G.C. Waldrep and Rusty Morrisson, and who also publish Colorado Review. I'm just really excited and honored and blown away. I think Hoover is a strange and wonderful writer (with whom I have no acquaintance), and I'm just amazed and honored that he picked my book.

Also, check out CARRIER WAVE by Jaswinder Bolina, who won the prize last year. It's a good book...

Roundup in TONY

2007-03-29T16:53:00.000-04:00

Hi. So I haven't been very vigilant at blogging, but please check out this roundup I did for Time Out New York of four news books of poems: Geoffrey G. O'Brien's GREEN AND GREY, Meghan O'Rourke's HALFLIFE, Christian Hawkey's CITIZEN OF and Paisly Rekdal's THE INVENTION OF THE KALIDOSCOPE.

Publishers Weekly National Poetry Month Coverage

2007-03-13T18:34:00.000-04:00

Just want to point folks toward the two stories I did for PW's National Poetry Month coverage, which we did early this year.

Peter Gizzi: An Author Profile

A Chance To Be Heard: on Literary Magazines

Also, take note of our new website, which launched this very afternoon.

Back in New York

2007-03-06T16:51:00.000-05:00

Welcome home everybody. Hope the flights weren't too bumpy.

Just want to address a comment that was made on the post below about the fact that I said, during the NBCC panel, that I don't think friends reviewing frieds' books is really a big deal.

First, know that in my work at PW, I do everything I can to ensure that the reviews I run are fair.

In my own reviewing work, however, and in the reviews I read, I'm not convinced that friends or aquantances reviewing each other is really at the heart of any of poetry's problems. Friendship with a poet doesn't promise that a reviewer will be unduly hard or easy on their book. That's up to the reviewer. And, anyway, reviwers should not be in the business of simply praising or condemning books of poems. There's got to be something more at stake there, some argument to be made about what poems should or shouldn't, or do or don't do, and if a friend's book is the best example, so be it.

That said, if a reviewer is assigned a book by an editor under the supposition that the review will be "unbiased" perhaps that reviewer should come clean. I just don't believe that any review is unbiased. I think there are other problems--like taking the risk of saying something more than superficial about a book--to be dealt with.

Dispatch from AWP

2007-03-03T17:38:00.000-05:00

From my very hotel room in Atlanta, here is a list of the books I picked up. Ain't that exciting!:

POETRY BOOKS

THE MAN SUIT by Zach Schomburg
GOLDBEATER'S SKIN by G.C. Waldrep
THE COMPLETE POETRY by Ceaser Vallejo
THE BOOK OF THE ANGEL by Medbh McGuckian
PENNYWEIGHT WINDOWS by Donald Revell
MISS AMERICA by Catherine Wagner
MACULAR HOLE by Catherine Wager
SHAKE by Joshua Beckman
SAINTS OF HYSTERIA
REVERSABLE MONUMENTS by Wiegers and De La Torre
ONE BIG SELF by CD Wright
THEORY OF ORANGE by Rachel M. Simon
A SEANSON IN HELL by Rambaud/Revell
IN THE ARCHIVES by Christopher Arigo
LIT INTERIM by Christopher Arigo
BREAKING NEWS by Ciaran Carson
SELECTED POEMS by Ciaran Carson
WEATHERING by Rusy Morrisson
IMMANENT VISITOR by Jaime Saenz

CHAPBOOKS

Octopus Chapbooks
Cannibal Chapbooks

PROSE

THE FIRE by Robin Blaser
THE VERSE BOOK OF INTERVIEWS edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki

LIT MAGS

JUBILAT 12
DENVER QUARTERLY VOL. 41 # 2 & 3
FENCE vol 9 # 2

ridiculous, no.

SEE YOU IN ATLANTA

2007-02-28T12:21:00.000-05:00

As I imagine many of you will, I'll be at AWP starting tonight. I'll be doing some roving reporting, getting drunk with faraway friends, and a panel on saturday morning about poetry reviewing. Come check it out: NBCC panel, 10:30 am saturday.

see you there

TALK SHOWS by Monica de la Torre

2007-02-24T22:29:00.000-05:00

I really can't express how exciting this book is. It's long-awaited and long overdue. De la Torre is about as smart as you can get about the ways different languages--Spanish, English, body, public, private, TV, radio, whatever--meet up and get kinda confusing at the crossroads. She's also funny as hell, aesthetically challenging, and always thinking about the ways a poem can make meaning. This really should be one of the books poetry people are talking about this year.

2007-02-20T10:36:00.000-05:00

Books I'm excited about today:

GREEN AND GRAY by Geoffrey G. O'Brien
STYLES OF RADICAL WILL by Susan Sontag

ah, whatever. Gather ye whatevers while ye may. To be, or whatever--that is whatever. And so on.

the Poetry Foundation...ugh.

2007-02-15T10:53:00.000-05:00

I'm going to rant here for a minute, as I don't think I can organize my thoughts and feelings into anything much better. I've just finished reading poet and New Yorker editor Dana Goodyear's excellent article about Ruth Lily's 200,000,000 bequest to the Poetry Foundation, which, if I understand it right, beyond my own biases, portrays the foundation as making poor use of it's unbelievable gift. I certainly think that it is. It's making terrible use of it. The foundation, and its president John Barr, is acting pompously, offensively and not in the best interests of the art form of poetry.

I'm not saying anything about the magazine, which, under Wiman's editorship, is much improved. It's still on the conservative side, but that's fine--that caters to its audience. And Wiman's added poems by poets like DA Powell and Tomas Sayers Ellis, acknowledging that some of the most important poets now writing are not doing anything conservative. Wiman's also turned the commentary section into a healthy place where minds can clash about poems.

The foundation--the governing body that oversees the magazine and the new website (for which, I admit, I have written), on the other hand, seems to want to ignore, or bulldoze through, the fact that poetry is a subtle and esoteric art. What is good for the general public--steady jobs, summers at the beach--may not be good for poetry.

Poetry--poems themselves, not the magazine--is good for poetry. The intense reading of poems, the steadfast belief that turning one's thoughts and imaginings into carefully considered language is an imperative human act--those are the things that lead to poetry growing and changing and becoming important in new ways to the culture. Not tie-ins in women's magazines (as Goodyear points out the foundation is trying to sell; they want to have poems, like little trinkets, next to spreads about how to set your table or whatever; ahhhhhh).

The most troubling thing for me is this: as far as I can tell, poetry is not something that should be thought about--at all--in terms of the masses. Poetry must be thought about in terms of individuals. It is one of the last bastions of individual experience. Poetry should be read by one person at a time, alone, just them and the book facing them, someone else's language and their language meeting up in their mind. That's where poetry happens. Exploding it into some cultural phenomenon could destroy that. Then poetry is destroyed.

Then, of course, there is the way the foundation has used their money--on themselves! Goodyear quotes Ethel Kaplan, the chair of the foundation's board, as saying, "Nobody wanted to sit back and read grant proposals--especially from poets." My god! How utterly offensive. They have an unfathomable fortune, which they could use, for instance, to help promising young poets who could not otherwise afford them get college educations, put poets in schools, or they could support the small presses that allow poetry to be published at all, and instead they've made a website that needlessly competes with the already wonderful Poets.org, they're trying to buy a building, and trying to turn themselves into some kind of flagship for popular poems. That's so--there's no better word--selfish.

Go read the article. Goodyear tries to be fairly balanced in, as the New Yorker always does, but, it's hard not to come out of it offended.

My Valentine to the World

2007-02-13T22:20:00.000-05:00

I wrote this essay for the Academy of American Poets. It's about poet couples, including Plath and Hughes, Hall and Kenyon, CD Wright and Forest Gander, and the Waldrops. I interviewed the last two especially for the piece. They said very sweet things. Hope you like it.

2007-02-13T10:29:00.000-05:00

Some new, or fairly new, Rosemarie Waldrop poems on the New American Writing website. Just can't get enough of her. Her work, as well as her husband's and a number of other like-minded (if that term is fair when it comes to such individual minds) writers', has become increasingly central to my poetic cosmology.

-

And this too--a book for the smart person's bedside table. Australian Critic Clive James (who made his name in England) has written a mammoth book of short essays about major 20th century cultural figures, from Kafka to Borges to Diaghilev to Miles Davis. In the 6 or 7 pages of each essay, he gives a short sketch of the figure under consideration, then proceeds to digress his way to a concentrated opionion. Strange, challenging, and certainly satisfying.

2007-02-10T14:36:00.000-05:00

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES will be, I bet, one of the big literary books (in English--it's already well into its life in Spanish) of 2007. And the world will be hungry for 2666, Bolano's last book, in 2008.

It's, as I said, a strange book, but enormously satisfying to read. Reading it, I have that sensation of reading a book that doesn't quite work like any other book I know. Not much happens, in a way, and yet, a lot happens: absurd encounters between slightly ridiculous characters, lots of promiscuous sex, and constant talk about poetry: how to publish it, which literary movements are cool, and who are the cool poets in the neighborhood. All the while, the political unrest in Chile flows through as an undercurrent. It's really an astonishing book.

2007-02-08T23:01:00.000-05:00

Today I'm excited about Roberto Bolano, who became one of the most important Chilean writers of his generation, then died, at fifty, a few years ago. New Directions published his early books--short novels and stories--and now FSG will bring out the major book he published during his lifetime--THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES--this April, to be followed by his INFINITE JEST-sized postumous novell, 2666, in 2008.

I read some of the stories in LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH while riding the subways today, and tonight I started THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. Bolano is a strange writer. He's not much interested in things happening. He writes a lot about poets, these poet characters he likes, tortuted, self-obsessed, melodramatic. He may be a kind of spiritual cousin to Sebald. Susan Sontag liked both writers. But Bolano is also related to his Latin American forebearers like Garcia Marquez, though there is no magic, per se, just a slippery sense of what constitutes a book.

So far in the novel--and I'm only up to page 11--the main characters, who narrates the book as a kind of journal, talks about how he rebelled in his poetry workshop and joined a group of renegade poets called the viceral realists. There is some time spent waiting for these poets in a bar, a pretty waitnress, and a bad poem, which sends the protagonists into a fit of masturbation. And what is exciting or satisfying about this? I'm not quite sure, but it is certainly satisfying. There's an energy about it. More soon.

2007-02-07T15:31:00.000-05:00

I'm reading this book, REMAINDER by Tom McCarthy. Vintage bought it from an English publisher. It's pretty good. Wants to be a bit more whimsical than it is, I think...

Also, check out this very thorough analysis of Rosemarie Waldrop's CURVES TO THE APPLE, by Ben Lerner, in Jacket issue 31. I wrote a bit about this book before when I was head over heels for it last fall. I've been reading some older Waldrop (both Keith and Roesmarie, actually), and have been no less stunned. They really are two of the best and strangest writers working in America right now.

Technology!

2007-02-06T14:27:00.000-05:00

How crazy is technology. The reading Brenda, Wayne and I did on sunday is now available in its entirity in streaming web-audio at the Speakeasy website. See, you no longer have to do anything to do anything!

2007-02-05T16:07:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's reading went very well, and was actually extremely well attended, especially for superbowl superday, and the coldest day ever.

A few books from the future that I'm interested in:

NOT FOR MOTHER'S ONLY: edited by Rebecca Wolf and Catherine Wagner, published by Fence. An anthologhy of women poets--ranging from Jean Valentine to Elizabeth Robinson--writing about "child-getting & child-rearing." Out in May.

FATA MORGANA by Reginald Shepherd. Out this month. Very intense.

THE NIGHT by Jaime Saenz, translated for Forest Gander and Kent Johnson, published bu Princeton. Book length poem by major bolivian poet, in English for the first time. Looks really good. March.

2007-02-02T21:02:00.000-05:00

So, like many of you I'm sure, I did not win the APR book prize. But the thing that really annoys me is that there were no finalists listed on the letter, meaning I don't even have the satisfaction of cursing their names. Anyway, congrats to Gregory Pardlo, the winner. I look forward to seeing your book this fall.

Other books--old and forthcoming--which I am excited to dip into this weekend:

WAKEFULNESS--John Ashbery: Robert Hass wrote one of his poet's choice columns about a poem from this book way back in the late 90's or early aughts--his columns are about to come out in book form--and I liked the poem when I read it, so I got hold of the book. It's time for Ashbery and me, it really is.

FRAIL-CRAFT--Jessica Fisher: Gluck's forth yale pick, due out in April. A seemingly unknown (except, as it happens, to Robert Hass) poem--unknown, at least, to me--who writes compact, intense, mournful lyrics. Looks promising. Gluck has been the best Yale judge in decades.

ONE BIG SELF--CD Wright: this book really kicks ass. I expect we'll all be talking about it come april when it's out and about.

2007-02-02T00:40:00.000-05:00

"I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free."

How good is that line? It's so odd, and yet right on--we want things that are "immortal and free," don't we? I've had a difficult relationship to reading Ashbery. When I first discovered "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" in college, I was spellbound. The poem thinks so hard and so obsessively about its many subjects. But there are no other Ashbery poems like it. It took me years to learn how to read his more typical poems, the ones that range everywhere and anywhere, held together only by the bemused, somewhat kermudgeonly voice that utters them. But he's inescapable, and for poetry that thinks its way through itself, there's nothing better. But so many of the poems are unsatisfying. Or are they? I'm never sure what I think when I pop out the end of one, which, perhaps, is a testament to their, as Kafka said, "indubitableness."

Next week his new book, A WORDLY COUNTRY hits stores. It's not unlike his last few--full of that same Ashbery product--but there are a number of standout poems, especially the first one, which is rhymed. And maybe there's something about those trademark poems that we still need. Maybe he's still struggling to say something that needs to be said, and that struggle is important to bear witness to.

2007-02-01T08:46:00.000-05:00

What I'm reading this fine, wild thursday:

Still finishing PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. In some ways, I think this is one of those books that must have been incredibly radical at the moment it was published, and is now a bit sleepy because its innovations have been completely digested into the culture, those being the repressed Jewish character (who Woody Allen subsequently developed and popularized completely) and the sex, which is now as common as cracks in the sidewalk.

Also finishing NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU, filmaker and performance artist Miranda July's forthcoming book of stories. If you like her work, this book will seem perfect to you. It's sweet, unabashidly sentimental at times, and sad in that satisfying way that sad can be sad.

And CD Wright's ONE BIG SELF, a revised, poems-only version of her collaboration with a photographer. They went into a handful of southern prisins and made work based on the experience. The book was only available as a fancy art book for a few years, and now Copper Canyon will bring out a handy paperback. This'll be one of the much talked about poetry books of the year, not that that will mean much talk.

2007-01-31T08:45:00.000-05:00

I'm three years late on everything, I know, especially on sensitive-person-soundtracks, but I can't get enough of Sufjan Stevens. Especially the album Seven Swans, which was my constant companion at MacDowell.

Let me say this: the nice thing about going to an artist's colony (or on a vacation or something of that nature) is that when you're there, you don't have any problems. At all. The trouble with not being there, then, is of course the fact that problems abound. Who knew?

New Poem on Verse Blog

2007-01-30T16:12:00.001-05:00

Check it out. And come to the reading on sunday. and and and

Superbowl Sunday Poetry Touchdown

2007-01-29T10:21:00.000-05:00

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."

Change of Format

2006-12-07T13:54:00.000-05:00

I've been a terrible blogger lately. Basically I haven't had time to write, or haven't prioritized my time that way.

But I still very much like having a blog, and am still very committed to reading blogs.

So, I'm going to try something new for a while. Basically, I only feel like blogging about books, so, henceforth, this blog will contain lists of books I'm reading and want to read, along with selected commentary. I know it may seems presumptuous to assume that anybody wants to know what I'm reading, but I like reading lists, and one of my favorite things about blogging is how democratic it is: if someone don't like my blog, they can simply ignore and no one is hurt.

So, we'll see how it goes...

2006-11-29T00:05:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a lot of John Steinbeck. Almost done with EAST OF EDEN. I gather, from a tiny bit of reading on Steinbeck, that critics were unsure about his work during his lifetime. I can't quite see why, though I'll have to read up a bit more. He seems to me to be among the best novelists I can think of: poetic, lyrical, able to create believeable, engaging characters and to tackle the biggest of themes.

2006-11-22T22:35:00.000-05:00

Here's the link to an interview I did for PW with Nathaniel Mackey last week just after he'd won the American Book Award for poetry.

Happy T-Giving

National Book Awards

2006-11-16T02:20:00.000-05:00

Attended the National Book Award ceremony tonight. It was actually quite moving. Mark Doty introduced Adrianne Rich, who won their lifetime achievement type award. Then the New York Review of Books won an award. David Remnick of the New Yorker gave a moving tribute to the NYRB.

Nathanial Mackey won for poetry, which is something of a happy surprise. Gluck was the likely winner (I love Averno and would haved been happy if she won, though she by no means needed the prize), and there was also the young Ben Lerner among the finalists. I think Mackey's win is a wonderful step for experimental writing, and should draw some much-deserved attention to Mackey's career.

Richard Powers won for fiction, which was not a surprise.

2006-11-15T12:01:00.000-05:00

Just up today is a piece I wrote for the Poetry Foundation website about Williams Carlos Williams.

2006-11-14T17:52:00.000-05:00

I've got to stop telling folks to check things out.

Reading Steinbeck--THE WAYWARD BUS about a family that runs a sort of truck stop and bus station in the middle of nowhere california. Don't know what happens yet. But I like Steinbeck very much. His prose is simple, but still ornimented where it needs to be, full of metaphors, and forceful. Something makes me want to compare him to Hemingway and to say that I'm enjoying him more than Hemingway. I have this idea that Hemingway had to work very hard to make writing come out and that Steinbeck was someone who just issued prose. That's not based on anything, just a notion I have from reading them.

2006-11-10T11:52:00.000-05:00

When you have a moment, please check out the new issue of THE BROOKLYN RAIL (available online, and in old-fashioned print around NY) in which I've got a poem.

2006-11-06T22:47:00.000-05:00

*Please check out the new issue of LA PETITE ZINE (www.lapetitezine.org), with a long poem by me, and great poems by friends Stefania Heim, Thomas Hummel, and Jasper Bernes, as well as wonderful poems by others.

*Reading INTO THE HEART OF BORNEO by Redmond O'Hanlon, a funny travel book about two Englishman's journey into Borneo. Along with the author, poet James Fenten goes along on the trip. I'm also reading through Fenton's new SELECTED POEMS, out last month from FSG. Fenton is an important poet in England, who writes cleverly and movingly about war, among other things.

*Sat on a panel this weekend for CLMP about poetry reviewing, along with Herb Leibowitz of Parnassus and Albert Mobelio of Bookforum. I hope we gave the attendees something useful. It was certainly fun for me to talk that much about reviewing, which has become an increasingly important part of my writing life, and a way to read better and better. It's a practice I recommend highly.

THING TO CHECK OUT

2006-11-02T12:21:00.000-05:00

* My good friend Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's interview with Dan Chiasson @ Guernica

--
a reading update upcoming.

2006-10-28T18:30:00.000-04:00

Reading BIdart's earlier poems collected in IN THE WESTERN NIGHT. In these poems, BIdart is as intense as he is now, but far less obscure. The first two books nakedly wrestle with Bidart's relationships to his parents. There are also extremely disturbing poems about insanity, the best of which is "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky," a dramatic monologue spoken by the early 20th century dancer and choreographer, as well as by his wife. Over 30 or so pages, it narrates his building awareness of his own insanity as it relates to his art, a subject that seems dear to BIdart. There is also the stunning "Confessional," an attempt at reconciling his anger at his deceased mother.

I find Bidart's intensity almost contagious. When I sit down to write after reading him, I feel crazed, almost out of control. Frightened of him and myself.

I love the newer books, especially "Stardust," but often find myself lost in the longer poems, which are usually tied to other texts. But, still, that palpable intensity remains. There is no poet like Bidart. The influence of Lowell is obvious, but no one has taken these things to quite the lengths Bidart has, even, perhaps Lowell (though Lowell's gruesomely confessional sonnets are probably more crazed, and destructive, than anything Bidart has done, or is likely to do).

2006-10-23T16:54:00.000-04:00

Very saddened by the news, which I read on Josh Corey's blog, that Deborah Tall, poet, memoirist, and longtime editor of Seneca Review, has passed away. I never knew her, but came to admire her greatly through some correspondence we had about Seneca Review, and through her new lyric essay/memoir, A FAMILY OF STRANGERS, which I read over the summer. It's an astonishing book, a very powerful account of a search for origins after the Holocaust scattered her family. She seems to me to have been a very positive and generous force in the American literary community. I'm sad indeed to hear she's gone.

2006-10-22T22:06:00.000-04:00

A busy weekend with dinners and a wedding and drinnks, then a lazy sunday today. Got a bad case of that feeling I always get on sundays where everything feels fake and distant. hate that feeling. It makes me wish for monday.

The Paul Hoover book is pretty good. Not much surprising in it, but a lovely set of aphorisms at the end. He's kindof a light surrealist or something.

Is everyone sending out their mannies? It's that time again. Write your checks, cross your fingers, and be good for goodness sake. Ugh.

2006-10-20T23:23:00.001-04:00

I want to add another book to my weekend reading list. CURVES TO THE APPLE by Rosemarie Waldrop. I've read the first two of the three books collected here. I was never sure of how to relate to Waldrop's work, but I cracked this book about a week ago and something shifted in me. I was ready for it. It's astonishing, some of the best writing I've read in a long time, some of the most moving. I've found myself completely in the thrall of this book since I started reading it. I'm not feeling particularly articulate now, so I'm just going to type in one of my favorite pieces from the book. But suffice it to say that Waldrop has a way of rendering a discussion about the relationship between language and experience using very dense and tricky language that makes an utterly convincing argument about how we live in the world as thinking beings.

Here's part 20 from the second section of Waldrop's LAWN OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE, the 2nd book collected in this volume:

What's left over if I subtract the fact that my leg goes up from the fact thait I raise it? A link to free will or never trying as only our body knows to disobey an even trade to the sound of a fiddle. Something tells me not to ask this question and accept the movement. The speed of desire like a hot wind sweeping the grass or flash of water under the bridge. For doing itself seems not to have any volume: an extensionless point, the point of a needle out ot draw blood regardless.

2006-10-20T11:23:00.000-04:00

First things first: my profile of Paul Muldoon is the cover story of the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (click here). This accounts for all of this summer's posts about Muldoon. I was working on this article, and trying to be secretive about it.

I've been laxed about my blogging, for which I feel bad, especially given that I put my blog in my P & W bio.

On the reading list for this weekend:
POEMS IN SPANISH by Paul Hoover
THE EROTIC LIGHT OF GARDENS by Bin Ramke
A book by Tom Bissell

2006-09-23T19:17:00.000-04:00

Reading Wayne Miller's ONLY THE SENSES SLEEP, just out from New Issues. Or I guess the technical pub date is 10/1, but you can get it already. Highly recommended.
*

Also reading Alice Notley's new book ALMA, OR THE DEAD WOMEN. It's a bit of an uphill climb, but full of gems. Sort of a deeply obscured novel in prose poems and verse, or the other way around. The cover is utterly beguiling.

*

Now I'm off to see Alex Lemon read with B at the Burning chair in Brooklyn. I guess the L trains out, but you should come anyway.

2006-09-21T23:36:00.000-04:00

OK, so I’ve pretty much established myself as an infrequent blogger. That’s the truth—what can I do. Thanks to those who still check in.

*

What have I been reading? Of late, my favorite book of poetry is THE BEST OF MY LOVE by Aaron Kiely, from Ugly Ducking. He’s brilliant, earnest, right about everything he says. This book is better than most books I’ve read in a while. Get it! Get that and Alice Notley’s selected poems.

*

The Yale Review took a poem recently. I’m excited about that.

*

Check out the new FORKLIFT, OHIO, in which a poem of mine appears. Especially check out Matthea Harvey’s poem, “Dinna Pig,” in the same issue. You can see her poem on line, though for mine you’ll have to find a copy of the print edition, and I think it’s mail order only.

*

I’m listening to fusion-era Miles Davis right now. And I’m drinking water.

2006-09-04T13:23:00.000-04:00

THIS CONNECTION OF EVERYONE WITH LUNGS: POEMS
by Juliana Spahr, Univ. of California (2005)

This fast-moving collection is one of the more effective poetic responses to 9/11 that I’ve read so far. It’s composed of two extended pieces in prose, the second far longer, though perhaps ultimately less moving, than the first.

That first piece, matter-of-factly titled “Poem Written After September 11, 2001,” overtly references that day only in the title. The poem itself is an attempt at consolation and the assumption of responsibility by the individual for the events that take place in the larger world, seemingly outside of the sphere of individual influence. By an impressive act of linguistic accretion, Spahr manages to illustrate how each individual in factually, if not scientifically, connected to every other, and is therefore responsible for everyone else. She begins like this (I will use this symbol “#” below to separate quoted text from my own writing):

#

There are these things:

cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells

and then the general beating of circulation

and hands, and body, and feet

and skin that surrounds hands, body, feet.

This is a shape,

a shape of blood beating and cells dividing.

#

Soon she shows us this:

#

There is space around the hands and space in the room

…

Everyone with lungs breaths the space in and out as everyone
with lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out

#

Toward the end of the poem, several pages later, she has built up to this:

#

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands
and the space around the hands and the space of the room and
the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space
of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the
space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space
of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the
space of the troposphere in and out

#

While the experience of reading this work can get a bit tedious (she adds another element to the growing list with each new stanza/paragraph), which is my only real issue with this poem, Spahr manages to take us through, or lead us into, a prolonged act of empathy. By the end, it seems impossible to think of oneself as anything but a part of a minutely interconnected system, which, hurt at any one point, is hurt throughout. Hence, by titling the poem as she does, she shows us all to be responsable for the events and aftereffects of the Trade Tower bombings. It’s at once a grand gesture of consolation and a powerful call to do something to repair the damage.

That gestures segueways into the second part of the book, which takes up most of its pages. It’s called “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003.” It’s made up of many several-page sections titled with their dates of composition. In it, Spahr narrates her own observation of the TV news as the bombing of Afghanistan and the War in Iraq gets underway. The poem is set in Hawaii, where Spahr is living along with a lover. She addresses the lover and us throughout as “Beloveds,” and, once again, links us to the unfolding events of the war:

#

When I speak of your thighs and their long muscles of smooth-
ness, I speak of yours cells and I speak of the British Embassy
being closed in Kenya and the US urging more aggressive Iraq
inspections and the bushfire that is destroying homes in Sydney.

#

I like this piece less than I like the first, in part because reading it is more tedious, and because the language is sometimes so journalistic it approaches regular prose, and because I have a bit more trouble buying Spahr’s syntheses of self and other in the poem. But, unifying the whole piece is a consoling, guilty tone—the same as in the first piece—that I find very remarkable.

Overall, I think this book is an important piece of 9/11 literature that in fact expresses the complex ambivalence many Americans have felt since 2001. I hadn’t heard much about the book and came to own a copy of it in a rather random way. I think it ought to be read by any sensitive person looking for a way to articulate their own feelings about the last few years in American life.

2006-08-21T00:39:00.000-04:00

Spent the weekend mostly hanging out with B and working on this piece I'm writing about Paul Muldoon. Also reading Lynda Hull's Star Ledger, which takes a bit of work to get into, but is really something once you're in. She's a kind of mix of Bishop, Rick Moody, Deborah Eisenberg, Amy Hempell, and I can't think of who else, though these are just the writers who come to mind right now, and they're probably not the right ones to describe her work. Also reading The Aeniad. Yup, that's what I'm doing with my weekend. Crazy.

2006-08-12T02:15:00.000-04:00

B and I have been listening to music tonight and having a wonderful extended conversation about how music shapes and fosters the identity of its listeners. A strange thing, music—a song is an aesthetic object, but it also exists in time, must be listened to, or at least rehearsed in the mind to have its effect. One can’t simply take away from a song one’s interpretation and be done with it; one needs to experience it, in the moment, to have any sense of what it is. If one is being a purist, the same is true of poems—they don’t mean anything, they are things. But we have so much trouble with that idea. In schools, poems are taught like puzzles, depriving would-be readers of poems’ true powers, which are to be things, to create experiences out of language, a medium we otherwise think of in terms of what it means. I’ve been having a little discussion with Andrea Baker on her new blog about this very issue in the poems of Kay Ryan. It took me years after high school to overcome the idea of “interpreting” poems. Now that I’m no longer anxious about understand what poems “mean,” I’d hate to go back to that other way of thinking about them. Which, of course, is not to say I want poems to simply be musical. I just never want to worry about paraphrasing them again. At their best, poems bring us back to a purer experience of language, to the place just before it means anything, to where words reach out to the things they refer to, but don’t quite grasp them, because once they grasp them, they’re dead.

2006-08-10T00:05:00.000-04:00

Trying to take a break from always writing/ worrying about writing. Certainly for me it takes on many of the characteristics of an unhealthy addiction all too often. Anyone else know the feeling?

So, I’m devoting myself to loafing around with B, playing my new ukulele (one of the spoils of my honeymoon), and reading a novel purely for pleasure, which I shall not write a word about.

2006-08-06T15:03:00.000-04:00

Cool! This is a word cloud that shows the most common words used on my blog. Got the idea from C.Dale Young's blog. Try it. Weird: http://www.snapshirts.com/custom.php?sid=6d5cedcb3207ebbe6ab1b4f9e3588e76

2006-08-06T02:04:00.000-04:00

My album purchases this week: BRIAN ENO: TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN (BY STRATEGY) and PATTI SMITH; HORSES. guess which one is better…

Ok, so I’m drunk now…

Pattie Smith is better, of course. Because she’s unafraid of her passion, no matter where it directs her. While Eno has very clear plans for where his passion, at least on this album, should go, though on later albums (like MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS) it’s less constricted.

2006-08-04T18:32:00.000-04:00

“…If poetry is knowledge, it is a forbidden one. These are not the kind of thoughts Mommy and Daddy are thinking as they sit in the parlor. The clearheaded are lonely. As for torments of self-doubt, could there be Art without it? Well, yes, surely, but not the kind that would have any meaning to Emily Dickinson and Louise Glück.”

The above passage is from Charles Simic’s review of Glück’s latest book, Averno— which, if you happen to have been reading my blog around the time of its release, you’ll remember I went on about quite a bit—published in the 6/22 issue of The New York Review of Books. It’s a very, very fine review, really Simic’s take on Glück’s whole career. He likes the early books and, of course, The Wild Iris, and, rightly, has some reservations about the books between that book and the new one. But he portrays Glück as nothing less than the very great and utterly powerful writer that she is.

As taken as I always am with Glück, I’m also very moved by Simic’s clarity and emotion as a critical writer. I wish I wish I could write lovely sentences like those quoted above, which not only say something deft and moving about the work, but, at the same time, leaping off the work, about what it is like to be human. Criticism should justify itself beyond its function as a window into particular works of literature by being compelling literature in it’s own right. That’s not a new idea, I know, but reading this wonderful essay on a writer I love by a writer who has also been very important to me—seeing what a good critic Simic can be—reminds me what good criticism can do.

2006-08-04T00:01:00.000-04:00

I’ve been listening, sort of obsessively, to Talking Heads for the past month or so, especially to three albums produced by Brian Eno: MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD, FEAR OF MUSIC, and REMAIN IN LIGHT (which I think is one of the best albums I know of). David Byrne was on hand to speak for—and from within—the ambivalent moment when late 70’s and early 80’s culture was reacting to, even clamping down on, the irresponsible ethos of the late 60’s and early 70’s. It was, I think, a confused moment, and Byrne understood the earnest desire to seek stability—through stable jobs, houses, committed relationships—as well as the undercurrent that came with that desire, which knew that that kind of stability was precarious, even a lie.

Tomorrow, I will endeavor to purchase Eno’s TAKING THE TIGER BY STRATEGY. I’m always late (two decades) on these things, but I find my way to them.

2006-08-02T22:06:00.000-04:00

So, a day later, I still think that BR piece is a hell of an interesting review, and a good example of the kind of skepticism in criticism that I think is much needed in the current poetry climate. It’s the kind of skepticism I aspire to when I review, but which I still feel like I am too timid to attain. Which is not to say that skepticism is my idea of the highest good in criticism. Compelling characterization of the work, and interesting prose are as important. I’m going to be participating in a NBCC panel at this year’s AWP (representing bloggers—for which I feel somewhat unqualified—and as a PW editor) on the current state of poetry reviewing. It’s months away, but I’m eager to see what we come up with. Topics want to discuss now include the kind of puff-piece review (of which I must admit I’ve written several) that has become common in many literary mags, what impact—if any—a review of a poetry book has on its sales/ renown, poets as critics, the abundance of (often similar) first books, and, of course, poetry and the internet. I wish AWP were sooner. I could use another vacaiont.

and miles to read before I sleep.
and miles to read before I sleep.

2006-08-01T23:17:00.000-04:00

I Surfed—I’ve just returned from Hawaii, remember--my way today to the newest issue of Boston Review, in which there is, at least to my way of thinking, an extremely incisive review of LEGITIMATE DANGERS by Katie Peterson. In her assessment of what she perceives as some of the major trends, and ticks, in the poems collected here, Peterson makes a number of winning characterizations of aspects of many young poets’ work that turn me off to their poems, that see like easy ways out of difficult problems. This passage grabs me particularly:

“Even though poems like these say they’re about us, the readers, they’re not really. They are performance scripts that demand our presence, but not our personhood. That is, we are not asked into the poem to react to a specific event or set of identifiable feelings; as Marvin and Dumanis write, “Neither of us feels that a poem needs to hold the reader’s hand or be ‘about’ something, especially about a specific event, thought, or experience.” Poems like Smith’s and Davis’s also seem to value our anonymity. They speak from little context and immerse us in an ambiguous emotional condition, one whose drama is most possible on the page or in the imagination.”

In the rest of the review—which I highly recommend reading—Peterson puts this paragraph in the context of a larger explication of a frustrating weakness in many poems. She goes on to say that most of these poets have demonstrated a capacity for more powerful work elsewhere. I think part of what she’s arguing against is the easy leap—for a writer of poems—into a poetic world that has little implication off the page, meaning that there is a tendency today, a trend, toward poems that are closed systems. The kinds of tragedies they describe are enacted solely in the language, not in the lives of those who use the language. The selves in the poems don’t come into focus because they do not refer to selves outside the poems, but to selves which only exist, in a piecemeal fashion, in the individual poems. This is more or less the problem I had—described yesterday—with the Peter Carey novel. Once the book is closed, the writing ceases to affect my life, because the world in which it’s set is only habitable within the narrow confines of the individual novel or poem. It’s as haunting as a game of checkers is the day after it’s played. Perhaps that’s too general and harsh a statement—and I’m aware that I’m not backing myself up here with specific examples—but I’m finding myself more and more drawn to writing that has an implication—and there are many ways of connecting sufficiently with a reader to foster a real implication—for my own sense of selfhood. I don’t mean I want all poems to be about me, but I do want a poem to elucidate, create, point out, a sinkhole that I’m capable of falling into, a risk that I take by reading the poem, rather than one that I could only take were I to live in a hazily shaded fictional world that exists only in the poem. I hate to close a book and never feel forced back to it, simply because I know I have no fear of encountering the same vulnerabilities in my real world.

back from paradise

2006-07-31T21:50:00.000-04:00

Hi all,

so I’ve been a patchy blogger at best lately. Why? Well, a month ago I got married, which, as you can imagine, required a great deal of preparation. Then I was teaching night classes alongside my 9-5er. Then B and I went to Hawaii for our honeymoon. We got back this morning. It was paradise, and the transition back to normal life will not be an easy one (for one thing, it’s unpleasantly hot here). In Hawaii, I bought a Ukulele, and am now slightly obsessed with it. And B and I spent a lot of time snorkeling, boogie boarding, and drinking tropical drinks. There’s not much of that to be had in NY.

But, now that things have calmed down, I hope to resume writing a bit more regularly.

Read the new Peter Carey novel on my honeymoon (it’s ok—a novel that doesn’t quite extend beyond the boundaries of the world it’s made; in other words, it doesn’t have much implication for me, or, to my way of thinking, any reader. An entertaining read, though). And read about half of the Collected Poems of Donald Justice. Some wonderful things there, but, overall, I was underwhelmed, or at least there were fairly few poems I want to return to. Still reading a great deal of Paul Muldoon. And thinking again about Lowell.

There are a bunch of forthcoming books I’m excited to check out when I get back to work—look out for a debut by Jillian Weisse and a new edition of Thomas Transtromer.

More soon.

2006-07-03T00:44:00.000-04:00

Post-wedding shock and business is beginning to settle down, and I feel like B and I are resuming, and beginning, our life. This long weekend has given us some time together, for which I’m very grateful.

After years of virus and spyware infestation, and an increasingly sloth-like and frustrating computing experience, I’ve switched from PC to Mac. The changeover has been surprisingly pleasant, and I’m a bit obsessed with playing with my new toy—and Macs have a way of feeling much more like a toy than a pc. It’s got so many little gadgets and doohickeys. And it’s fast enough to run GoogleEarth (my old one couldn’t handle it), which is an altogether thrilling and mind-boggling experience—the world has gotten small and vicarious enough for us to travel it (and actually have a kind of experience traveling it, seeing it pass beneath us) while simply staring at a screen. Very strange.

Listening to a lot of Brad Mehldau, reading a novel and Paul Muldoon. Seem to have gotten over Lowell for the time being. Reading the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis, Ben Lerner, the new issue of Tin House (with a compelling interview with Will Self, whose forthcoming novel THE BOOK OF DAVE I’m eager to read on my honeymoon), and watching Woody Allen movies. Ah, married life…

2006-06-25T00:31:00.000-04:00

I’ve been off this particular grid for a little while. Why? Well, I just got married. B and I were married last Saturday, June 17th. It was a lovely ceremony—Jewish with some poetry mixed in—and the party was completely overwhelming to me: dozens of friends and family members from all parts of my and B’s lives. It’s strange; in that situation, you have to kind of shift between the memories you share with each person or group of people. It’s like you’re climbing into a different brain, a different part of your past or present, at each table. Anyway, totally overwhelming, and exciting, and overwhelmingly touching.

But there was a lot of preparation to be done, obviously, which didn’t leave much time for blogging. But things are calming down now, so here I am.

What have I been reading…let’s see: tons of Robert Lowell. The letters alongside the poems and a biography. I can’t quite get over the way he was willing to portray himself as the monster he seems that it seems he was—I’m reading a biography, too, LOST PURITAN—well, and his ambition. It seems he set himself the goal of becoming the most important poet going, and he did. Anyway, I can’t say much about how I’m feeling about Lowell now. Suffice it to say, he’s what I’m reading.

I’ve sort of finished a big writing project, and I’m caught in that space after a big writing project of wanting to start something new and not quite being ready to start it yet. I can’t really write right now, and I’d like to. Plus, I just got married and feel rather distracted. So be it.

Dunno. More soon.

2006-06-15T00:50:00.000-04:00

Hi all,

I have a new poem up at Guernica (www.guernicamag.com), which you can read or listen to me reading.

I'm getting married on Saturday. Wow.

2006-06-10T03:41:00.000-04:00

So I haven’t posted anything in a long while, a fact about which I feel somewhat guilty. But there’s a reason—I’m getting married a week from today (to B of course), so there’s been a lot preoccupying me. That said, I don’t imagine I’ll have much to say until the wedding’s done.

I’m about to finish reading GREAT EXPECTATIONS, which has kept me going through many a train-ride of late.

Hope everyone’s well.