Close Calls With Nonsense

I’m in Liverpool with the Irish poet and critic John Redmond. Check out his mysterious, rewarding new book of poems, which has both a Minnesotan (he used to live there, and to teach at Macalester) and a science-fictional/ computer game component.

My talk at Glasgow went quite well– thanks to the uni, and to Michael Schmidt, and to John Coyle and the School of Scottish and English Language and Literature (which goes by the alarming acronym SESSL, pronounced “sessile”). The relatively posh parts of Glasgow– the West End, around the University, and Kelvingrove– are truly beautiful, with greennness and neat slope, and some kind of bird with black and white, cupcake-like stripes on the wings, that seems to fill the same niche as the US pigeon. I hope to go back.

Time Out New York has a very flattering feature about me!

Elsewhere, there’s a provocative denunciation of pretty much all contemporary reviewing, from Matthew Zapruder at the Poetry Foundation site, and there’s a poem by Liz Waldner at Verse Daily today.