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News Flash: PoBiz Highly Competitive!
More on Alfred Douglas here The ten most competitive jobs in America based on data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), a U.S. Department of Labor database full of detailed information on occupations. Note where being a poet falls in terms of competitiveness. Of course, the only poets in the U.S. for whom poetry is a job are … oh, yeah: There aren’t any! Though there are jobs out there that one’s standing as a poet depend on. How many? I haven’t found a source for that information.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
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Creating the Possible
“There is something Chinese about Ausonius,” Helen Waddell writes of the late-late Roman poet (c. 310-c. 395 CE) in The Wandering Scholars, and then compares him to Po Chü-i. She quotes from one of Ausonius’s poems, “Fields of the Sorrowful Lovers”: They wander in deep woods, in mournful light, Amid long reeds and drowsy-headed poppies, And lakes where no water laps, and voiceless streams, Along whose banks in the dim light grow old Flowers that were once bewailèd names of Kings.Read More