Hey, you want to hear something poets know that politicians don’t know? (Hell, I’m not sure the press, those prolix word meisters, know this either.) You know all the talk we’ve heard about George Bush and Sarah Palin and John McCain not being able to parse a sentence, right? Well, what poets know is that [...]
Read More...Some people are holding parties. Some are learning what it’s like to walk on air. Some are gagging on their anger. But whether jubilation or fulmination is your dish of tea, I have something in mind that perhaps we might all celebrate: The New York Times on its op-ed page the day after our momentous [...]
Read More...Judyth Piazza, director of The Student Operated Press, whose students I advise, has interviewed me about Far From Algiers, my first book of poems. The book is the 2007 winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Prize in Poetry of Kent State University in Ohio. Find the entire 30-minute interview here, and you can hear [...]
Read More...My wife and I rearranged our living room the other day. “Living room” has always struck me as a feckless term, questioning as it does what one does in other rooms. Our project was no mean feat, given our cranky backs and comic geometric discourse.
When we were done I glanced around the room, which also [...]
Among my dwindling pleasures is reading The Times Literary Supplement, particularly its back-of-the-book NB column, which is by turns curmudgeonly, wry and arch, and sometimes all three.
In a July 18th Francophilic musing about the Dictionary of Foreign Quotations (Stacey International), NB digresses to quote Adolph Hitler. Leadership is primarily decisiveness, said the Fuhrer. False ideas [...]
The poet Laurin Wolf of Kent State University in Ohio has asked me a series of questions about my life and poetry that has just been posted with my (windy) responses. The insight and depth of her questions took me by surprise, always a good sign in an interview. Her questions and my answers come [...]
Read More...One of the dicier aspects of being liberal is having to confess always seeing the fifth side of a four-sided thing. It’s not as restful as being a fundamentalist or an ideologue, but it’s more exciting, and that is perhaps why fundamentalists get so het up about the other guy’s wrong-headedness. They have to get [...]
Read More...Arabesques Review, which briefly suspended publications to reorganize, has issued a call for submissions. This trilingual literary and cultural review is published online from Chlef, Algeria, and has published work from writers worldwide. It will be represented Oct. 10-13 at Le Salon des Revues in Paris. Readers should note that the review’s Internet domain name [...]
Read More...Gloria Mindock, editor of Cervena Barva Press, interviews me in the just posted No. 39 of the press’s newsletter. Gloria is the managing editor of the Istanbul Literary Review for which I recently wrote The Modernists of al-Andalus, a consideration of the Arab and Jewish poets of medieval Arab Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus, [...]
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