When I’m feeling unusually busy at home I think of a saying communicated to me by someone else I trust absolutely, but atttributed (by that someone else) to the scholar Marjorie Nicolson: “You can always read a sonnet.” That is, you’ve always got time, somewhere in any day, for 14 lines.

David and I will have time for a few sonnets this Friday at Harvard Book Store on Mass. Ave. at 7pm. Drop in!

Plenty of Boston-area poetry readings by major figures coming up, including Kevin Young tonight at BC, James Tate, Matt Rohr and Joshua Beckman tomorrow at Harvard, and W. S. Merwin next Friday at Harvard. I will likely attend, at most, one (see previous post!).

I’m also reading with Ben Mazer at Pierre Menard (10 Arrow St, Harvard Square, Cambridge), at 3pm this Sunday. See you there? No worries if you can’t make it.

Anyone else see this document about “self” and “poem”? I got it from a U of Chicago mailing list and it’s feeding what are already rather convoluted thoughts about the evolution of (and the resistance to) the idea that we have selves, or that poems have selves too. I expect to turn those thoughts into some writing as soon as I can (which may not be super-soon), perhaps in conjunction with my mixed but ultimately admiring reactions to the projects of Jennifer Moxley, whose self-in-poems seems to run exactly against all the positions that her initial supporters in the post-avant world seemed to take.

I won’t attend the AWP conference in Denver, due to imminent baby! though I am still on the program: if you go, you can hear Jeff Shotts of Graywolf, Don Revell, and Tony Hoagland talk about stuff tangentially related to– and perhaps more interesting than– than some stuff I wrote.

If you are professionally involved in the study of literature, the so-called book world, you might want to know that Publishers Weekly has been purchased. Looks like a good owner. (I hope they re-hire my friends.)

If you are so involved, you should also consider joining the National Book Critics Circle. I’m now on the board; if you ask, I can tell you why you should join, and tell you more about the good things it does.

It’s got a witty– but by no means optimistic– ending, and has me scurrying to the second novel in the triad; if you want a short, optimistic look at one way to solve a very big political-cultural problem (though not global climate change) check out this anticorruption tool from India (and from Indian expats). It seems to work!

And if you want to see ecocriticism done entertainingly and reasonably and in a way that might actually interest “lay readers” and American historians (not just professional literary criticism), check out this book about how we see (or don’t see) what goes on in the National Parks.

My student Victoria Ascheim is a videographer for Harvard’s Office of the Arts: in the latter capacity, she made this long video in which I talk about Laura Kasischke, Kay Ryan, and poetry-in-general.

Julie Carr in the new Colorado Review has reviewed Close Calls: she gets it exactly right. (It’s flattering, too– though it also outs me as a [gasp!] liberal humanist: don’t tell my devoutly poststructuralist far-left friends. Come to think of it, can you be devoutly poststructuralist? I think it involves a contradiction in terms; then again, that’s what a liberal humanist would say.) Check out Counterpath Press, which Carr co-runs. (Co-operates? Co-exists?)

The Art of the Sonnet has been published, as of this week: there’s a big glossy hardcover copy in front of me now. Thanks to David, and to our editors…

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.

Also new and wonderful, though not quite in the same way: thanks to Jessie, the book covers to the left of this post now reflect my next book, co-written with David Mikics. We’ve also brought up to date the part about me.