I recommend visiting San Antonio if you have the chance; I also recommend asking someone at Trinity University what they’ve done right to get students so interested in contemporary poetry: my talk-and-reading was packed. Thanks again to the San Antonio Express-News, and to Jenny Browne, whose own Q&A with the Express-News you can read here.
I appear to have poems in the current issue of ILQ, a web-based journal with a truly intercontinental scope: the editor works in Argentina, and the contributors include John Kinsella from Australia, Elaine Feinstein and Sujata Bhatt from Britain, and Susan Stewart, David Shields, and Rita Dove from the USA.
Natalie Panno of WHRB (Harvard student radio) talks to me in a radio show about love poem for Valentine’s Day. She also talks to Woodberry Poetry Room curator Christina Davis; Christina reads aloud a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, and I read a poem by Liz Waldner.
The University of Virginia Press has started to promote a book I’ve coedited with Nick Halpern. The book honors, with new poems and new lit-crit works, Helen Vendler. We’ve been told that the book, called Something Understood, will be published in May. (If you’re not sure whence the title, see here and also here.)
As for Close Calls itself, the finished book now exists! I’m inordinately excited about the physical object now that I’ve held it in hand.
And as for upcoming work– the gates are about to shut on the stampede of sonnets to be considered for brief essays in the book-about-sonnets now underway. It looks like this one, great for teaching, gets in after all. Question of the day: why does the nineteenth century, so rich in light verse, not offer more comic sonnets? I’d write about this one if it weren’t three-sonnets-in-one, conceived such that none of the sonnets looks that great alone; and I’m truly tempted– though I should clearly resist the temptation– by the nineteenth-century American comic poet John Godfrey Saxe, a writer of no enduring merit, I fear, but a great lover of clams.
Neat piece about me in the San Antonio News-Express. I’ll be there soon.
Work about poetry read online and enjoyed, just in the last few days: Helen Vendler makes a case for Simon Armitage in the New Republic; David Orr mulls “greatness” in the NYTBR; Camille Dungy, blogging at the Poetry Foundation, promotes Cal Bedient’s journal Lana Turner, which has not (whatever O’Hara said) collapsed: if you order the journal (and I think you might) you’ll find a stellar, scary, essay on Jonathan Richman and the global financial collapse by Joshua Clover, which many people are talking about, and a very good long poem in versets (lines of verse so long they are almost units of prose) by Juliana Spahr, which no one I know is talking about… yet.
By the way, what are your favorite recent books of prose poems (books of nothing but, or almost nothing but, prose poems)? I may have enough such books to start writing an essay (Waldrep, Brian Johnson, Stonecipher, Allison Benis White). And here’s a journal that publishes nothing else.
Not sure whether the sermon– used to such brilliant effect by writers from, say, John Donne to Dr. King– is still a live art form? Read this short new one, and you will feel sure.
Still reading the stack of AWP-books, in between other, more urgent matters (e.g. writing a lecture on Wordsworth, playing with Nathan and Nathan’s school friends). I’m not sure what, exactly, I want to do about this book-length poem by Laurel Blossom, composed not in lines but in freestanding sentences, and encompassing, tersely, her dramatic life, including her tempestuous parents, her alcoholic past, and her present as a world traveller (hence the title) with particular attraction to polar regions. I am sure that this book could get stunningly popular, especially if the people who read literary memoirs, but don’t read much current poetry, realize that it’s a poem but it’s also a memoir.
At the Whitney Biennial, by Jordan Wolfson (via Jessie). A must read see.
Just back from the AWP conference, where our panel went quite well (more about it here soon, I think). As usual, I came back with a sackful of books and journals (though a smaller sackful than last time– less time in the bookroom). The best so far (I haven’t read them all!) come from writers whose names I already knew: the current Black Warrior Review has sestinas by Sandra Beasley that stand among the best poems of hers I’ve yet seen, and Liz Waldner has a new book called Trust from Cleveland State. I’m still processing said book, but there’s at least one poem, called “On the Way Home,” with St. Joseph at the end and a great deal of existential angst at the beginning, that made me feel like the top of my head, etc.– I’m considering mailing photocopies to friends.
Time Out New York likes D. A. Powell’s new book a lot (they should; it really might be the year’s best); in saying so, TONY’s reviewer, Michael Miller, has very kind words for the now-forthcoming Close Calls.
I will be on a panel next week at AWP in Chicago, talking about contemporary poetry and superheroes, along with (among others) Tony Barnstone, Chad Parmenter, and Bryan Dietrich, whose Superman book is the gold standard in these matters. If you know of contemporary poems with comic book superheroes in them, please alert me to those poems post haste: there’s a short essay about them in the works too.
Also upcoming: I’m reading at Trinity University in San Antonio at the end of this month, on Feb. 26. And I’m in the new Believer, on Robyn Schiff, though the full text of that one isn’t on line. (Why not buy the issue?)
Want to see what images I’ve been showing my Major British Authors class (actually part two of a yearlong survey, beginning at the Restoration, though many students take part two before part one)? You may, if you so choose, check out the course blog. No lectures, but some images, and the syllabus itself, if you’re curious there.
Posting here should increase in frequency (and I hope in interest) as the pub date for Close Calls approaches!
