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Louise Glück Wanders Off the Mountain
Many years ago, when Louise Glück’s The House on Marshland was fairly new, I had the privilege of teaching it (or musing about it in front of others), along with three or four other full-length books of poems. Instead of cherry-picking poems to illustrate this or that form, technique, style, or voice, we engaged whole books on the level of theme, world-view, the force-fields created by various approaches to metaphor and tone, and yes, worked to understand what the author intended to say.Read More
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On W. S. Merwin and Paul Carroll
I want to celebrate the selection of W. S. Merwin for U.S. Poet Laureate. I encountered him first though his collection The Lice in a contemporary poetry class taught by James Doyle, and it’s still a touchstone book for me. Soon after that I stumbled on his great poem “Lemuel’s Blessing” in Paul Carroll‘s indispensable book The Poem in Its Skin (see below), and I was hooked. Merwin is one of maybe 20 poets I go back to when I get depressed over my own poetry or the poetry I’ve been reading.Read More
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Red Tail
The hawk James Wright famously watched from a hammock has alighted in this haunting poem by Tom Montag.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 7
James Wright is one of my favorite poets, a man for whom poetry was “the grace of pain” (to quote my earlier quote from Breyten Breytenbach) and whose openness was not a poetic strategy but the fruit of long spiritual/artistic struggle. I chose the following poems from Wright’s Above the River: The Complete Poems, attempting to steer clear of his more widely anthologized work. One magnificent quality of Wright’s work is that one never doubts there is a human being behind it, as opposed (let’s say) to some Flarfist bot wandering cyberspace like a nihilistic spider.Read More
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A Blogger’s Notebook
ODE TO CONNIE FRANCIS AS THE U.S. BANKING SYSTEM COLLAPSES In the midst of a typicallyAmerican money crisis,in which we allall of a sudden findslippery strangersin the Capitoland in our ownbathroom mirrors,Linh Dinh—a poetborn in a far-offcountry ravagedby one of our mostfamous wars—postson his blog a blurryslide show: gorgeousold-time photosof Connie Francis;they parade before usas she bitter-sweetlysings.Read More
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The Further Adventures of Bill Knott
NOTE: This review appeared in the July/August 2008 Issue of The Bloomsbury Review. ©2008 by Joseph Hutchison. Stigmata Errata EtceteraPoems by Bill Knott Collages by Star Black Introduction by Mark Doty 68 pages, paper ISBN: 0-9754990-4-1 Saturnalia Books 13 E. Highland Avenue, 2nd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19118 Some poets adopt the artistic assumptions of their historical moment and achieve significance by discovering new subtleties in the existing modes or by extending the range of content those modes can accommodate.Read More
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For Valentine’s Day
Love in a Warm Room in Winter The trouble with you isYou think all I want to doIs get you into bedAnd make love with you. And that’s not true! I was just trying to make friends.All I wanted to doWas get into bedWith you and make Love with you. Who was that little bird we saw towering upside downThis afternoon on that pine cone, on the edge of a cliff,In the snow? Wasn’t he charming? Yes, he was, now,Now, now,Just take it easy.Read More