- What the Poet Must Answer for is the Un-Poetic Poetry in Person is a rare gem that could easily be overlooked. Alexander Neubauer has carefully edited together old school cassette tape recordings of in-classroom conversations between the legendary Pearl London and a long list of poetry super-stars. Just some of these poets include: Robert Pinksy, Lucille Clifton, Edward Hirsch, and Muriel Rukeyser. Poetry in Person is next-level […]
- 8 Things I Learned From My 1st AWP 1. The smartest book-sellers offered free cocktails with their heavily discounted books. Shout out to Wesleyan University Press and their Moscow Mule + 50% off BAX anthology deal. 2. I have resolved that writers are extraordinarily aware of the space they occupy in the world. I found myself sitting at a lot of big roundtables […]
- AWP16 Offsite: All the Parties I’m Crashing This will be my first year going to AWP, and I’m sufficiently stoked that all of my writerly people are descending on Los Angeles. For the uninitiated, AWP is the mega-glorious conference for North American publishers, writers, and writing programs. There are far (far, far, far) more impeccable readings and parties to go to than is humanly […]
- 50 Words: Sleep as Information / The Fountain is a Water Feature Ed Steck’s 2014 pamphlet from COR&P will translate REM-sleep cycles into longitudinal word equations for you. The work is an unearthing of ephemeral neural networks, an insomniac charting territories around thought-patterns, an embodied record of disregarded taxonomies within consciousness. I enjoyed the non-linear cycling immensely. A portrait of a brain. Buy this limited edition book direct from […]
- Books, Books, Books Sometimes when I imagine heaven, I think of it as an endless library. An infinity to explore sounds nice to me. I think the library will extend far beyond just books. I imagine being able to have endless conversations with lots of people throughout history. I started using my moleskine journal in a slightly more calculated way […]
- Reflexive Reflection I have ascertained that when I am not actively engaging in reflection, I get angsty. The angst grows in proportion to the time I do not afford myself to reflect. A real creeper. It appears in the depth of tension in my back muscles. Notably, I’ve found the same to be true when it has been […]
- 50 Words: Mandy Kahn’s Math, Heaven, Time Mandy Kahn’s Math, Heaven, Time (Eyewear Publishing) has a balmy quality, offering a welcome mat. This collection is smart and extraordinarily accessible, with a surreptitious mysticism. Can’t you hear Rilke in Kahn? Her poems are savory, lucid, accidentally philosophical. It seems they ask us to live more sincerely. Buy the book direct from the author here – for $15, or direct from Eyewear […]
- 50 Words: Rodney Koeneke’s Etruria Rodney Koenke’s Etruria (Wave Books) entranced me with the opener: “Toward a Theory of Translation.” His collection joints the marrow and bone of the quotidian details of love and language with a sort of ancient-futurism. Koeneke charts memory like a cartographer whose instruments were crowd-sourced: his voice is familiar. Buy Etruria from Wave Books. This […]
- 50 Words: Donald Platt’s “Essential Tremor” Donald Platt’s piece, “Essential Tremor” reads like a paternal seismograph. It has a performative patience, but still runs like a rabbit. Poetry typically slows me to a prayer’s crawl – this piece does something of both: it’s a hybrid of breath and speed. The form is arrow-matic, and brightly confessional. To enjoy Platt’s piece, and many others for […]
- Condensed Poetry Reviews in 50 Words (Yes, exactly 50 words.) Since my foray (read: baptism by full immmersion) back into poetry, I have been reading furiously. The last nine months I’ve been submerged in language (by way of advanced conversation courses at the Italian Cultural Institute), re-learning Latin at home, and stacks of contemporary poetry. It is, assuredly, a vast luxury to be surrounded by […]
- Born in:on Blue In the last week or so, I have said to more than one person that my return to poetry makes me feel born again. I do not know how not to use religious language for this experience, but I do think that spirituality and language have the same geneologies. I’m talking goodnight ma- goodnight pa-goodnight […]
- Continuare “C’era una volta…” I began, to answer the question of Michele, our Roman professor for this semester. I gathered to myself that if I started out with a pithy English idiom in Italian (“Once upon a time…”), I could fool everyone into thinking that I have a lot more comprehension than is true. A few days […]
