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Jonathan Greene Travels Back in Time
Jonathan Greene Don’t miss the simply marvelous poem by Jonathan Greene in Ted Kooser‘s American Life in Poetry column today.Read More
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A Large Red Heart: Three from William Pillin
Sometime back, I don’t remember how long exactly, I lent one of my favorite books to someone, I don’t remember who. I wouldn’t have remembered it’s absence had I not decided to send a poem from it to Jonathan Greene, co-editor of the lovely new anthology Succinct: The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems. That aim brought me to the “P’s” in the Poetry section of my library*, where I discovered an empty space instead of the book I was after, To the End of Time: Poems New and Selected, by the underrated poet and pottery artist William Pillin.Read More
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Immodestly Noted
Order on Amazon Succinct The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems edited by Jonathan Greene and Robert West Broadstone Books 418 Ann Street Frankfort, Kentucky 40601-1929 My contributor’s copies came in the mail yesterday, and oh my—what are the odds that an off-the-main-map poet like me would find himself among such company? Somewhere between Anonymous and Zukofsky, within hailing distance of Archilochus, Arnold, Brandi, Bunting, Heaney, Kinnell, Niedecker, Rosenow, Villon, three Williamses (Jonathan, Miller, and William Carlos), and yes, Willie Yeats. This gave me a strange sense of elation, enhanced by the beauty of the physical book itself.Read More
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On Penny Harter’s Recycling Starlight
In a recent review of Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, the politico-literarily inept Lorin Stein reveals himself to be a refreshingly direct, no-nonsense reader of poetry. He values Vendler’s Dickinson for its “sensible, elegant interpretations” of a poet who “has become our founding experimentalist.” By that he means that we are encouraged “to find [Dickinson] daunting: cagey, coy, subversive, furious, elliptical. These are qualities,” Stein adds, “we tend to prize, and even fetishize, in poetry today.” He’s right, of course, and he’s right that this view distorts Dickinson.Read More