I loved this quote from J. I. Kleinberg’s The Poetry Department so much that I am compelled to share it with you: “…it’s the nature of the work that a poem is getting at something mysterious, which no amount of staring at straight-on has ever solved, something like death or love or treachery or beauty. And […]
I was casting about for something to post here to mark the so-far quiet beginning of 2022, and at poetryfoundation.org I found this brilliant essay by northwest poet Linda Bierds about a poem by Margaret Avison. As a bonus, I learned about this book — Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems — published a while back, in 2006. […]
I’ve been floundering a bit. Hard to explain it all, but then — this afternoon, in my email in-box — this arrived. I decided that I should put it where I will remember to reread it. Happy 2022 to you. May this year make us stronger, wiser, better, and may we all live to write […]
If you are still wondering what to buy the fiction-writer on your Christmas list, I am happy to recommend Alice McDermott’s What about the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). McDermott’s 2013 novel, Someone, is one of my favorite novels of all time. At some point I decided that where McDermott leads, […]