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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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Open and Closed, Part 8
I’ll never forget the evening I first encountered Robert Bly. He’d come to read at the University of Northern Colorado, where I was an undergrad English major with poetic pretensions. I’d heard of him but never read his poems. The event took place in one of those featureless industrial classrooms with accordion partitions, and the audience was large enough to fill the second room, so Bly ended up reading into a long narrow space awash in humming fluorescence.Read More
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An Interview with W. S. Merwin
Thanks to Jilly Dybka for the link to this lovely interview with W. S.Read More
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Hanging On
This illness is hanging on. Just a cold, sinus and lung. But the slowness of recovery is a hint, I imagine. Lowell: Age is the bilgewe cannot shake from the mop. —”Ulysses and Circe,” in Day by Day * A sense of conflict in the distance, over a hill,but inside: civil war….Early morning battlefield mist in the chest.A muddy taste in the mouth. * And this from W. S.Read More
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The Poetry of Outsidership
I just discovered a site called Goodreads, and yesterday I posted this brief review there. I’ve expanded it somewhat and added a few links for this incarnation. Someone once pointed out that judges of the Yale Younger Poets competition are dependent on what comes across their desks. There are fat years and lean years. W. S. Merwin’s first year as judge was a lean one, evidently, since he could find no manuscript worth publishing. But last year was a fat one, if Fady Joudah‘s The Earth in the Attic (selected by Louise Glück) is any indication.Read More
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No Bull Prizes
On his very entertaining blog, the wonderful poet Bill Knott posted his top 10 poet choices for the Nobel Prize. It’s a fun exercise! Here are my ten, in descending order of age (on the theory that we should honor them before they’re dead): Nicanor ParraAndrea ZanzottoCarolyn KizerW. S.Read More