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Adios, Paul Auster
I came Paul Auster not through The New York Trilogy but through a skinny chapbook from Station Hill press called Facing the Music, published in 1980. It had goodbye woven all through it. Not “goodbye cruel world” but goodbye to poetry, which he’d been writing and publishing for a decade. It was his last standalone collection, and when I think of him now, I think of those 13 pages of valedictory verse. Poetry may address emptiness but it thrives in being. Auster needed prose to keep one foot firmly planted in each of those conditions.Read More
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My Pandemic Year in Books
So Many Books, So Little Time I could have sworn that I’d read far fewer books this year than in past years, but it seems not to be so. It must be one of the few benign side effects of the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic has been hard on my writing, poems—at least poems of my kind—seeming fairly pointless amid the waves of infection and death and the tide of fascism rising out of the GOP (the Goosestepping Old Party).Read More
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Pretentious
Okay. Drop by this post on the Poetry Foundation’s blog Harriet, if you feel like a good laugh.Read More