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I am reading two books that record love affairs with books. Book affairs I’ll call them, though I suppose replacing the verb with a noun distorts the meaning a bit. Treasure Island!! by Sara Levine chronicles the obsession of the young adult narrator with the children’s book. By “young adult,” yes, I mean she’s in …

Lately, it seems critics don’t have much to do except talk to each other about the value of criticism. (Since I’m writing this, I include myself in that circularity.) The NYTimes published this pro-criticism piece in the magazine. Slate put out this elegantly titled articled “Against Enthusiasm” bemoaning the twitter, back-slapping turn in criticism. Thanks to @BostonReview, I read …

This rant by Marjorie Perloff has me thinking a I try to review a Big Book by a Big Poet.  This big poet, despite her claim, seems to have written a small book with the failings that Perloff identifies at the beginning of the article: a formulaic, loosely lineated, prose-poetry “lyric” melange.  In Perloff’s view, such …

Since having the opportunity to write and now edit some criticism of art and poetry, I have been asking myself often whether criticism is necessary.  What do I get out of writing it? And what I get out of reading it?  One satisfying answer I stumbled on came from Roland Barthes. In The Pleasure of …

John and I are working on two nascent projects.  Number one is our real baby, due to enter this world very, very soon.  Number two is http://whenceandwhither.tumblr.com/   Eventually, this will move to whenceandwhither.com but for now, we are playing tumblr to amass some images and allow them to coalesce around some themes.  We’re envisioning an on-line …

I enjoyed this poem by Eric Kocher in the Boston Review because it refused to let the metaphor and image stabilize.  From the opening stanza: “when he holds a pigeon, when he once was a pigeon, when he has become, within a coop…” The man has a pigeon, is a pigeon, is a holding place …

This post on the Book Benchcaught my attention because I do feel guilty about re-reading novels.  However, I don’t feel that way about re-reading poems. (Unlike Spacks, I suppose I also do feel guilty about re-watching films, but not about re-listening to songs … I feel guilty about lots of things, but that’s a longer, …

I really enjoyed chatting last week with Jess Nostrand, director of The Project Room in Seattle.  She and her many artistic collaborators have some good things going on. I wrote more about it here on Crosscut.   I’m not sure I’m ready to commit myself to authorship for the virginity loss stories on somethingsonlyhappenonce. but …

I was so happy to see this poem in the Colorado Review print edition picked up by Verse Daily  

Last night I was talking with another poet about who we’d like to work with and why. We began to make generalities about schools of thinking on poetry whether we liked them or not. One distinction to which we were (inevitably?) led between “intellectual” and “anti-intellectual” poetry. I said that anti-intellectualism piqued me and expressed …