(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 [...]
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...(Human Dark With Sugar, Brenda Shaughnessy, Copper Canyon Press, 77 pp, $15)
Anyone who has ever watched—observed—a dragonfly alight on a leaf will appreciate Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems. The difference between the poems in her second book, Human Dark With Sugar, and my own poems or those of any number of poets whose work I read is [...]
Everything is an authorized version of something else. Everything and everyone has a back story. It’s because of this that we might usefully give more thought to championship, not in the sense of winners but in the sense of championing someone else.
We could ask ourselves why certain artists (I use the term here to [...]
My mother frustrated galleries by balking at sales of her work at the last minute. She readily gave away some paintings, but often parting seemed like elective surgery. She just needed certain paintings as much as she needed her mirror.
That’s the way I feel about some books. I need them in certain places in [...]
Why is the press held in ill repute? I’m sure you have your ideas. One of mine is that it’s because the press is often so contemptuous. Nobody likes a smart-ass, but the press likes its own smart-asses too much.
There are many reasons newspapers are losing readers—the rise of the Internet, the shortsightedness of [...]
I’ve been wondering what an extraterrestrial spy would make of our Christmas shopping season, which one writer has described as a national commercial emergency, so I’ve been drifting in the human torrents of Manhattan—SoHo, Nolita, LoHo, Greenwich Village, Madison Avenue, 57th Street, all the places sucking in oodles of money and complaining it’s not enough. [...]
Read More...“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought [...]
Read More...Yesterday was a landmark in the history of publishing. The weekly Circuits section of The New York Times led off with a story, An Entire Bookshelf in Your Hands by Peter Wayner, about e-book reader technology. Nothing unusual there. Circuits, like Wired magazine, has covered e-book readers all along. What is significant about yesterday’s story [...]
Read More... The daily online Writer’s Almanac of the American Public Media Organization is a national gem. Last Saturday, observing the poet John Ashbery’s birthday, it quoted him saying something that pickets ought to brandish on placards outside every MFA program in the land:
“To create a work of art that the critic [...]