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Reading Cardenal with Cardenal
Last night I had the luminous experience of reading beside Ernesto Cardenal. This was a hastily put together event on the Regis University campus, in the St. John Francis Regis Chapel. Despite the late notice of Cardenal’s appearance (most folks didn’t hear about it until the day of the event), an audience of 50 or so mostly young people turned out to hear him. My old friend Victoria McCabe had emailed me the previous afternoon to ask if I could help out by reading the English versions of Cardenal’s poems. The poet wanted his poems read by another poet.Read More
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Letting It All In
Presa Press has just released a book by one of my longtime favorite small press reviewers, a fellow poet by the name of Eric Greinke. Poets in Review gathers reviews from two decades of this activity, decades separated by 32 years of … well, not reviewing. Greinke doesn’t explain the long hiatus, merely noting in his introduction that his first decade of reviewing reviewing began in 1972, and during that period he was paid $50 per 500-word review by The Grand Rapids Sunday Press.Read More
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Interview with Ernesto Cardenal
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Lo Siento…
I’m sorry to say that time and chance conspired against me writing the extensive reviews I meant to write of the three remarkable books pictured above. There were others I meant to address, but these were so large and rich that I defaulted to my usual practice of flagging passages I might quote in my comments. As you can see, each of these books is festooned as a Renaissance frigate—and for good reason. Each one is layered, subtle, thought-provoking, profound, and profoundly entertaining.Read More