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“ ‘The ancient teachers of this science, said he, ‘ promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promised very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hand seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour over …

In the horrible/uncharitable/anti-feminist introduction by Rieger to the edition I’m reading, he claims that we shouldn’t see Frankenstein as precursor to science fiction because: “The science-fiction writers says, in effect, since x has been experimentally proven or theoretically postulated, y can be achieved by the following, carefully documented operation. Mary Shelley skips to the outcome …

“The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of …

We saw Frankenstein by the British National Theater in a film version at SIFF last week. I’m afraid it’s leaking into my writing. That’s not inappropriate, but I don’t want to let it color the work too much. The play and the book are about the creation of life, the mystery of the difference between …

“There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pinesWhen Winter lifts his voice; there is a noiseAmong immortals when a God gives sign,” -Keats, Hyperion. A Fragment

I’ve just discovered Kay Ryan. Well, really, I’ve heard about her for years, picked up her books and rejected them a dozen times, and now, finally, I’m captivated and compelled by her precision and minimalism. I’m thinking about Ryan, along with Rae Armantrout and Heather McHugh, in preparation to review a few other new books. …

Because I have a lot of grading to do, I thought I’d read some Keats in order to fortify my soul before its drain. I have been thinking about Hyperion but I hadn’t yet reread it. In the poem, I find a wish for magic. That is a wish I understand. It’s the same desire …

“I’ve had, I would say, four major phases in my life where I’ve been genuinely interested in poetry — interested in reading it, as opposed to writing it. Because writing poetry it is a very different activity. Writing it, its as if the word ‘poetry; is a thousand miles away. It’s inapplicable.”- Nicholoson Baker, The …

Shall I sow some words? PoetryI am reading Thomas Sayer Ellis’s Skin, Inc. and finding myself in a complex socio-political net that he has constructed for himself and his readers. It must be exhausting to write with such hyper consciousness of yourself and your readership! FictionI’m craving the last Stieg Larssen book the way I …

My new adviser just gutted a poem of mine and gave me some wonderful advice. On a practical level — on the level of judgment — he was totally correct about what the poem needed. But on a theoretical level, I am puzzling about this advice as a general stance. He told me to review …