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Sad News…
Reginald Shepherd—poet, essayist, anthologist, fellow blogger (visit here and here), and a good friend to The Perpetual Bird—passed away yesterday evening (according to this post by Emily Warn on Harriet) after a long and painful contest with cancer. I never had the good fortune of meeting Reginald, though we corresponded off and on by email. He wrote beautiful poems and passionate, intelligent essays, many of which first saw light on his own blog. We will always have his books, but I will miss the ongoing dialogue he conducted with poets (living and dead).Read More
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Closed Histories
I’m too harried with work to write a thorough review of Sara Veglahn’s extraordinary chapbook Closed Histories, but I want to take a moment to recommend it. To the extent that comparisons are useful in describing a distinctive new voice, I would say that her work has similarities to writers as diverse as Karen Volkman, Yves Bonnefoy, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux, and the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons. Needless to say, I hope, these associations are subjective, and Ms. Veglahn herself might disavow them all! So I should let her speak for herself, if briefly: From the window, light.Read More
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A Blogger’s Notebook Poem Wordle-ized
Now this is fun: my “Blogger’s Notebook” poem “The Things That Carried Them” as graphically transformed on Wordle. I posted the original on this blog some time ago.Read More
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Poetry Class War
“[I]f you look at the dozens and hundreds of anthologies of contemporary USA poetry published over the past two decades, you’ll find compilations of poems or poets gathered and linked to represent many categories of differentiation and distinction, with one exception. There are no anthologies based on class.” This powerful observation comes from today’s installment of Bill Knott’s blog.Read More
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Linh Dinh on Linh Dinh
Linh Dinh is one of my favorite writers, and you may get an inkling of his appeal from a terrific new interview with him published this summer in The Pacific Rim Review of Books. Here’s an excerpt: The two cultures I’m most familiar with, the U.S. and Vietnam, are tremendously fake, but in different ways.Read More
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Vlad the Inhaler
Bill Knott mines pop culture, American lingo and be-bop here.Read More
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No Contest
Travis Nichols has posted his reaction to Stacey Lynn Brown’s account of her frustrating experience as the winner of a Cider Press Review publication contest. Nichols calls her account a “tale”—a term that is just one brick in the wall he wants to erect between Brown’s revelations and Nichols’ evident faith in the contest system. Personally, I’m grateful for Brown’s candor, and I set out to post a response to Nichols saying just that.Read More
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Refreshed Web Site
I’ve been silent here for a while but not because I’ve been idle. I’ve been busily working to update my Web site (jhwriter.com) with a new look and lots of new content. Give it a spin! And please let me know, either here or there, what you think about it.Read More
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An Homage to Bill Knott
Readers of this blog know that one of my favorite poets is Bill Knott, whose latest collection I recently reviewed for The Bloomsbury Review. In response to that review, my friend and fellow poet Thomas R. Smith sent along his own trenchant homage to Knott. The poem is due to appear in a future issue of Tundra: THE ARTISTFor Bill Knott Crown-of-thorns time is over.You should be taken down,entombed and risen by now—you who walk these empty streetswith your palms unbroken, still searchingfor someone to crucify you.Read More
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A Blogger’s Notebook 3
KEATS’S URN: A MARGINAL NOTEThe well wrought door clicks shut.The well wrought poemsprings open.Read More