image “borrowed” from stlog
Donald Finkel is one of those poets I’ve yet to get around to seriously reading but whose poems stand out enough that I actually remember them long after serendipitously discovering them in journals such as The Paris Review and The Chicago Review. Finkel’s name also comes up regularly in conversations and interviews [...]

Posted in General No Comments »

[photo shamelessly cadged from this profile of Carruth]
“I think that Hayden’s idea of a livable life is a life that has affection in it– a life, to give it the fullest scope of his art, in which the things you love are properly praised and properly mourned. What I most value Hayden for and [...]

Posted in General 1 Comment »

(about poetry and being a poet)
1. A word assemblage isn’t a poem just because someone says it is; no one really knows what a poem is.
2. Most readers of poetry are poets; no one reads poetry anymore.
3. Calling oneself a poet is to call attention to how one doesn’t fit; poets are one of the [...]

Posted in General 1 Comment »

Mlinko asks:
Why does this feel like some sort of joke at the expense of poets, from beginning to end?
Or am I reading too much into another meaningless non sequitur of a role for interchangeable starlets?
I answer, in order: “because you’re part of that group of overly-sensitive, post-avant, Sillimanite poets who are so often predictable in [...]

Posted in Uncategorized 1 Comment »

What a bizarre interpretation of Gioia and Oliver. Has he read any of their poetry? How about the poets each has championed? I’m guessing not. Yes, they both feel that form has been given a bum rap in the contemporary scene, but it’s far from the ONLY kind of poetry they are supporting. The essence [...]

Posted in Uncategorized 5 Comments »

From an interview with Billy Collins in Guernica:
Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. [...]

Posted in Uncategorized 1 Comment »