I’m reading in New York City on June 3! I haven’t read there in, oof, about two years.
And I’ve been away from this blog (trying to meet other deadlines, as usual). When you I don’t post for over a week, stuff I ought to want to note on this site just accumulates and accumulates: and by “stuff” I mean both reviews/ notices of Close Calls and (more happily) poetry- and music-related discoveries having nothing to do with me.
Among the latter: Jordan’s in Slate on the flu: why is it so hard to figure out how many people “die of” the flu every year? A few days ago he learned how to say snake in gibbon.
Three University of Montana MFAs in writing have their own blog. (It mentioned me last week, which was how I found it; it’s really a disarming miscellany– reading, teaching, reflections, pictures, “money-saving skills.”)
Very sad news about a very good poet– maybe the most energetic, in his commitment to the art, of all the poets my own age (or so) I have known.
Yearning for Shop Assistants videos and songs? Me too: Peter Scholtes’ music blog at the Minneapolis City Pages has them.
Bookslut looks at three Hurricane-Katrina-related poetry books, an article I’ve been hoping someone would write besides me. All three books have virtues– but they’re not the same virtues.
Mary Jo Bang quotes Pink Floyd in the Boston Review.
Lara Glenum introduces the Gurlesque.
Vast quantities of Walt Whitman’s writing, including all the major published works as well as some journals and correspondence and so on, await you online at the Walt Whitman Archive, a site (unlike most such things) supervised by leading academic authorities on the author in question. If you can’t read this poetry online, what poetry can you read online? (Or, as I fear, is a glowing screen a really good place to read journalism and personal notes and other prose ephemera, but a questionable site for poetry? Maybe you should just print Whitman’s shorter poems out.)
Among the former: Weston Cutter at Corduroy Books has a very generous review. I’m “honest and tender-hearted,” but not “yutzy”: what more could I ask? (No, not Jay Wexler’s Yutzy. Some other Yutzy.)
The British poet and biographer Ian Pindar likes Close Calls too.
Poetry Northwest ran an admiring review of Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (not sure how long ago it ran in the print edition).
I’ve got a long essay about new, dense, short poems (by Armantrout, Johnston, Treadwell, Valles, Yang and others) in the current Boston Review, but it’s not yet online.
The new online litmag Mayday has a forum on poetry reviewing, especially on negative reviewing: Kent Johnson writes a letter, and about two dozen poets and critics, myself among them, respond.
Some debate about me, and about the rest of the Mayday forum, at Johannes’s blog. I don’t like all the work that he likes, but I always read him.
In a discussion that also includes Johannes (with 42 comments [!] so far) Seth Abramson attacks me. He’s partly right, too.
Bookslut notices Nathan.
The Los Angeles Times notices me. (I appreciate the attention, but is Les Murray really “more playful” than John Tranter?)
And finally: the Minneapolis indiepop group the Owls, and two other groups (the Roe Family Singers and Matt Wilson, ex-Trip Shakespeare) recorded some lyrics I wrote for Minnesota Public Radio a year and a half ago–that much I knew; I didn’t know till now that the Owls had shot a video in which they record the song, nor that so many other singers have written their own music for the same words. I hope MPR does it again with another poet, one who still lives in the North Star State: perhaps Dobby Gibson, Eric Lorberer, Lighstey Darst, Kelly Everding, Steve Healey, Sarah Fox?
