On the cover of Dan Albergotti’s Millenial Teeth, a child attacked by lightning bolts configured to look like a dragon staggers backwards (the figures come from a warning label on electrical equipment). Rarely has a book’s cover served so completely as a metaphor for what’s inside. Albergotti’s poems speak from a heart wounded by currents […]
The public life of poetry can be both a sword and a shield. It can bind listeners together while reaching individual members of an audience in deep, profound, and diverse ways. The Auden quote that “poetry makes nothing happen” removes the phrase from its context in the second section of Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. […]
Late last month at the Blacksmith House I heard Robert Pinsky read from his new book, At the Foundling Hospital. I was rapt. “Omnivorous reverence” is the phrase Tony Hoagland uses to describe Robert’s artistic scope and method. One of the poems Robert read that night is “Running with Noodles;” it begins with the delicious […]
When Doug Holder asked me for some background information for his interview program on Somerville Cable Access, “Poet to Poet,” I referred him to a Q&A I did with the online journal Niche, not realizing the link had been taken down. Among other questions, I discuss the source of “Italian Nobody,” a poem in Know […]
Last winter, Emily Jaeger asked if I’d write a blurb for her first chapbook, The Evolution of Parasites, published this year by Sibling Rivalry Press. I wrote a few sentences about the visceral power of Jaeger’s language and imagination, and the intriguing ways she reads the spectacle of one body preying on another. Such praise […]
If you’re reading this, you have Enzo Silon Surin to thank for creating my website and, with it, my blog. Surin is a writer, a teacher, and the publisher of Central Square Press, which, according to its mission statement, strives “to publish poetry that does not cater to the academic establishment but is part of […]
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 […]