-
Pursuit of the Inexplicable (A Happy New Year Review)
Andrei Codrescu‘s The Poetry Lesson is a wonder worth beginning your new year with. The scene is an unnamed university in New Orleans, though we can be forgiven for thinking it must be Louisiana State University, where Codrescu taught for 25 years and from which he retired in 2009. More specifically, the scene is the first session of the last Introduction to Writing Poetry class the narrator, who is retiring, will ever teach. Melancholy and mercurial hope are built in.Read More
-
Revelatory Moments
Pacificby Ce Rosenow57 pages, paperISBN-13: 978-0-9643357-2-1Mountain Gate PressBrad Wolthers, Publisher2105 Glencoe RoadHillsboro, OR 97124 Poetry at its best encourages us to pay attention–not, finally, to the words but to the motions of mind and feeling behind them. Once we pay attention, we see that objective and subjective are simply two aspects of the same reality. Look out your window, then close one eye: you’ve lost perspective, so the view seems to flatten. Now open your closed eye and close the open one: the view remains flat and jumps to one side.Read More