Close Calls With Nonsense

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.