Close Calls With Nonsense

Monica Youn’s amazing book of poems about Krazy Kat has officially been published, and it’s the pick of the day on Poetry Daily!

Marjorie Perloff still likes the poetry of Rae Armantrout. (Me too.)

I’ll be onstage briefly at the marathon reading next Wednesday, March 10, at the New School, where everybody nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award this year can read for five minutes, presumably from the nominated book. It might be grueling, it might be a lot of fun, and if it’s like the last marathon reading I attended (in Chicago a year and a half ago) it should be a little of both. The NBCC’s James Marcus throws fine praise at Close Calls,for which I’m nominated, right here.

If you teach the poetry of Terrance Hayes you will have reason to look up– and your students will have reason to look up– an uncommon assortment of famous, but not very famous, musicians and other performers: that’s how I discovered, yesterday, the music of New Orleans piano player James Booker and how some of my students discovered the early-1970s peak personae of David Bowie. Next week I’ll have to play them some Kool Keith.