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

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

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."

Change of Format

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.