I’m writing for the first time about a book I haven’t finished yet. My friend Sharon Bryan recommended Rae Armantrout’s Versed, and I’m enjoying a precision as sharp and startling as the plunge of a needle in Armantrout’s spare, tight lines. Who expects “mass market” to follow a colon after the description “Ground cover of […]
After 18 months of retirement, I finally unpack the last box of books from my office at UMass Boston. I find books by colleagues; duplicate volumes of collected poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson and Jane Kenyon I needed absolutely both at home and at work; books I bought at readings our program sponsored; and […]
Dan Chiasson’s review of Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems 1950-2012 in the June 20 issue of The New Yorker quotes from the best-known poem in Rich’s first book, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.” He refers to it as an example of Rich’s early formalism “channeled cunningly” to describe a woman oppressed by domesticity who sublimates her genius and […]
It’s the 50th anniversary of Hanging Loose Press, which began in 1966 as Hanging Loose magazine, a journal that came unbound to your bookstore or mailbox in an envelope that doubled as a cover. This reflected budget constraints, but also the editors’ philosophy, which was, to quote from the HL website, “…that poetry is for […]
The title poem in Rebecca Morgan Frank’s The Spokes of Venus considers astronomer Percival Lowell, who mistook the reflection of his own veined eye in a telescope’s eyepiece for canals on the planet’s surface. This entanglement of subject with object, beholder with beheld, is at the heart of Frank’s new book. If “Everything before us/looks […]
Today I found out through Facebook (thank you Amy!) that the Poetry Foundation had posted “The Trouble with Spring,” a podcast of my comments on Jane Kenyon’s “The Clearing,” along with my own poem, “April to May.” The recording was made last year at AWP, so it’s fitting that the broadcast should occur during this […]
Poems to mark a new, fragile season.
My friend Caroline Finkelstein died early this week, not a year after she was first diagnosed with colon cancer. I met Caroline when she was finishing her MFA at Goddard College in 1978 and I briefly taught there. Caroline knew a lot about European history, painting, architecture, and gardening, subjects about which I know little. […]
I first met Ruth Lepson when Alice James Books was publishing Dreaming in Color in 1980 and we were both working members of the collective. Her subsequent books include I Went Looking for You and Morphology, a collaboration with photographer Steve Crump, both from BlazeVOX. Now I get to catch up with ask anyone, her […]