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I don’t want to write this review the way I’m expected to write it. I know I should keep the “I” out and pretend the thoughts I’m about to express come from some objective intellectual place separate from who I am as a person with a history. I could write it that way—I am capable…
Before we move on to things literary, I think we should begin this Independence Day week with Fozzie Bear singing “America the Beautiful,” which my mother incorrectly identified as our national anthem during her citizenship exam (she still passed). Actually, I kind of wish it was our national anthem—I prefer its focus on the extraordinary…
In truth, I had never put much thought into the Akron Series in Poetry in the past, partially due to my own ignorance, and partially due to aesthetics. However, lately, I’ve been more interested in the Series, edited by Mary Biddinger relatively recently beginning in 2008. I love what Mary says about her aesthetic tastes: “I…
The Green Shore Natalie Bakopoulos Simon & Schuster, June 2012 368 pages $25.00 In 1970, when feminists in the U.S. declared “the personal is the political,” Greece was three years into a brutal military junta, where public protest was harshly silenced with arrest, torture, or exile to remote island prisons. Yet despite the fundamental differences…
Last weekend I had the privilege to travel up to Bennington College, where I spoke on a Life of Letters panel with friend (and fellow Ploughshares contributor/guest blogger) Megan Mayhew Bergman. Megan and I are both alums of Bennington’s low-residency MFA program; I graduated in 2009, Megan in 2010. We sat down in the Symposium…
When the poet Alan Dugan was alive, there used to be a reading every summer in Wellfleet at the local library where members of his workshop would read their poems to, mostly, locals. It was a generous thing of Alan to do, and also something rare – seeing poets sharing their work in obstensibly the…
The work of getting a manuscript published, that rejection and frustration, begins to feel at times like self abuse. Writing is a lonely adventure, but most of us feel driven to it; quitting is inconceivable. Submitting work, though, is more like managing a business, and most poets I know are not business managers, so it’s…
Anatomy Courses Blake Butler and Sean Kilpatrick Lazy Fascist Press, January 2012 132 pages $10.95 Anatomy Courses by Blake Butler and Sean Kilpatrick is twisted in the best possible sense: linguistically. Butler and Kilpatrick’s work of fiction consists of 62 short sections, mostly one or two pages long, that interlock and move toward a visceral,…
When I entered Poets House on May 31st for Martín Espada’s Home Page talk on Puerto Rican poetry, I carried with me a long-standing memory from Ernesto Quinoñez’s Bodega Dreams. Early in the novel from 2000, the narrator recalls his junior high school in Spanish Harlem: The whole time I was at Julia de Burgos,…
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