Order Far From Algiers
The Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University in Ohio is celebrating its 25th anniversay. I have the privilege of taking part in this observance as the 2007 winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Prize in poetry. This article by Kyle Roerink, staff writer for The Daily Kent Stater, describes plans [...]
Read More...Those of you who ordered Far From Algiers from Kent State University Press in advance of last Friday’s publication date have received notice that it’s “on the truck.” Thank you for this vote of confidence. I hope you will be rewarded. If you contact me, I will be happy to inscribe a bookplate for you.
I [...]
When you search the web for Sinbad you’re likely to find David Adkins, the comedian, before you find that wealthy young sailor of Basra whose adventures are immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights.
When you search on Odysseus you find Homer’s mythological sailor immediately. We are, after all, Eurocentric, and worldwide accessibility to the web [...]
There are certain days when things don’t hold their shape. This is not just a middle-age weight problem or distortion through a tear drop. It can happen in bright sunlight. People go convex and concave. Buildings seem to play with hula hoops. Sentences play hooky on their periods. Things are not exactly where they ought [...]
Read More...Is that your start scuffed in your coat? I asked my wife the other day. I meant, of course, to ask if that was her scarf stuffed in her coat. It was a humble example of a spoonerism. I love spoonerisms. I think if we declared one day a week Spoonerism Day and observed [...]
Read More...Have you ever wondered long after a party about that certain somebody you didn’t meet but can’t forget? This is the subject of Gatecrasher, my short story in the June issue of The Country and Abroad. The beautiful woman whose image accompanies the story is my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione.
Read More...(Meditations on Rising and Falling, Philip Pardi, The University of Wisconsin Press, 87 pp, 2008, $14.95)
A good book of poems is not just a collection of good poems. Conceptualizing a book of poems is like conceptualizing a complex poem times ten. There are ways to play it safe: safe poems, safe structure. You employ what [...]
Do you remember The Gates (inset) in Central Park in 2005, that hydrology of orange banners installed by Christos and Jeanne-Claude? I don’t think anybody mentioned it at the time but it had a precedent among the Arabs. They used to hold great poetry competitions in which the poems were painted on vast banners. [...]
Read More...Noah Eli Gordon in an end paper in the Spring issue of Rain Taxi says he recently began to read page twenty-six of every book he owns. The more I thought about this quixotic adventure the more it enchanted me. As I compared it to the evening news, it seemed to me infinitely more [...]
Read More...If you’d like to look at the changing face of news, consider your own Google home page. Savor its interactivity. You can organize your news, weather maps, solar systems, art exegesis, you name it, and the list of “gadgets” grows almost daily. You can design your own newspaper.
But it’s no longer a paper, it’s news [...]