Close Calls With Nonsense

Nathan’s favorite word this week is “meta.” A dollhouse inside a dollhouse is meta, but a food item does not become meta simply because it has its name (“bread”) on its package. Sophisticated stuff.

Also sophisticated: book blogger Neil Verma, who devoted a graf to my Boston Review piece last month, and Canadian culture bloggers The Mark, who put Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden on a decade’s-best list.

That would be the last decade. I’m having trouble concentrating, right now, on the literary promise of this decade, because there’s a serious chance that a Republican will win Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. If you’re half as distressed about that prospect as I am, you might consider making a few calls, either from home or at an in-state event.

You might also be glad to see Coakley’s new ad. Had she been all over the airwaves with this one two weeks ago, a lot of Mass. Dems would be sleeping more soundly right now.

Back to poetry: my father and I went to hear Joan Houlihan read from The Us last night: the poems sounded good, and the story that connects them comes through when she reads.