Myopic Books is now restocked with copies of Long Nose Pinnochio Bitch and Cassie and my Postcard Poems. Get yours today. (I offered to sign the books, joking that it might raise the value. The woman behind the counter replied: “Guess I’ll have to wait until you’re dead!” When I remarked that I hoped she had to wait a while,…
I’ve only been very sporadically following the discussions about Foetry, the site that aims to expose the corruption of allegedly “open” poetry contests. I say I’ve only been following it sporadically because it’s been relatively absent from the blogs I read the most, although looking over at Shanna Compton’s blog it seems to have been burning up other sectors of…
Aches for Alli Warren Today the observation deck is ringed in clouds, which must be why reception’s going in and out like a lakeside crowd. Memory is a function of the shirt I’m wearing, its graduated stripes bleeding into the space between. I’m being called on to speak. What can I say but what’s already said in the course of…
I was stunned to pick up the Sunday Chicago Tribune and see (on the cover of the as-always woefully thin Books section) two massive poetry reviews taking up nearly the entire front page and jumping to swallow page 4 too. The reviews were by Maureen McLane–a scholar and poet who’s affiliated with Harvard and MIT but seems to have some…
Incoming! The Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago is sponsoring a visit by the poets Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks. They will be making the following presentations. Poet, critic, painter, and Professor of English at Harvard, Peter Sacks will deliver a lecture entitled “The Poem at the End of the Mind: Yeats, Stevens, and the Unintelligible” this…
Chasm for Alli Warren, among others A camera lens, a lamp, two sinks, an open mouth. The difficulty of the problem is its arrangement into a square, trimmed like bread and pooling in the center. What sounds like rhythm is really only a faucet dripping; an X marks the spot where the airline’s routes cross somewhere over Kansas. The jagged…
What I keep coming back to in Eileen’s response to Andrew Loewen’s apology is this insight: it’s not an uncommon strategy for people to “deflect” away from a complaint by turning a specific point into a more general point. Generalizing can allow avoiding the address of the specific issue, particularly on such sensitive matters as those involving race…(The specifics here…
Eileen on Andrew Loewen’s apology, which she finds not particularly satisfying for reasons she eloquently articulates (some emails are just too good for the Poetics list). But she accepts it nonetheless.
Somewhere there is a dog named Illinois.
Andrew Loewen apologizes.