Fired off my first postcard to Del. I still have some of those “Worst-Case Scenario Handbook” postcards left over from my correspondence with Cassie, so I plucked out “How to Jump from Rooftop to Rooftop,” which sounds like writing. My poem was called “Hymns of St. Bridget: Errata,” and was drawn from the errata sheet at the front of a…
Author: Timothy Yu
And isn’t there some backstory about Frank Bidart’s dragging out the editing of Lowell for years? Just poking around the Web I find one press release that says that Bidart’s edition will be released “in 2001,” while another says “in 2002.”
Any mention of Lowell seems to prompt a lot of hand-wringing from people who wonder whether Lowell was the last “major” American poet, the last poet who everyone needed to have read and who could command some broader level of cultural authority. Perhaps that time is simply as (deservingly) remote as the time when a poet could gain authority simply…
I guess I have this reactionary fantasy of going out and buying Lowell’s Collected from the biggest mega-chain-bookstore that I can find, grabbing a coffee from Starbucks to go, and holing up reading in a mountain cabin or Manhattan penthouse for about a week.
The freaky picture of Robert Lowell in the NYTBR this Sunday looks like he’s had part of his head cropped off–some kind of biologically disturbing imbalance between the thin wisp of regulated hair, the big nerd glasses, and the square jaw, all at that vaguely undead angle.
Tireless literary impresario Cassie Lewis has recruited Del Ray Cross and myself for the next installment in the burgeoning Postcard Poems empire. So starting today it’s back to one postcard a day, genius or not.
After an insanely hot weekend the heat has finally broken, making walking outside seem an exercise in narcissism–the flowers bowing and bending as I walk by. The campus population is doing its summer changeover from kids who look like they’re in high school but are actually freshmen to kids who look like they’re 12 but are actually in high school.…
T.P. Billy Collins!
Jim Behrle: the Nation has called you.
Three cheers (at least) for Steve Evans’s blog digest.