Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
After Long Busyness: A Poetry Blog (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
Lowell’s and Bishop’s collected letters. By Michael Hofmann Poetry Media Service Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $45.00. This is such a formidably and dramatically and lingeringly wonderful book, it is hard to know where [...]
Poet Mom (Free subscription) | 11/14/2009
It's raining horses and cows in downtown Boston! I'm at a Starbucks after just getting my hair done (HA!). I always seem to have hair appointments on rainy days. As a friend of mine told me yesterday, "Maybe I should stop making hair appointments—then we'd have better weather." Yeah, that'll never happen. Everyone looks like a wet dog today. **** Taking some Me Time today since the...
Pen On Fire (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
There just wasn't enough time with these two on the radio. So I sent them each questions and they each generously responded. Jincy Willett.... Barbara DeMarco-Barrett: On the show, you'd mentioned an author you just read and loved. Farrell? Book was...? Jincy Willett: The title is The Siege of Krishnapur , by J.G. Farrell. It won the Booker Prize in 1973. It's about the Sepoy Rebellion, p.o.v. clueless...
Five Branch Tree (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,...
Helen Smith (Free subscription) | 10/23/2009
Yes, of course I watched Nick Griffin on Question Time last night. But before that I went to Josephine Hart's Poetry Hour at the Royal Society, as part of the British Academy Literature Week. Kenneth Cranham, Charles Dance and Elizabeth McGovern read poetry by T.S. Eliot, Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Kipling and Robert Frost. It was wonderful. One of my favourite...
Poet Mom (Free subscription) | 10/19/2009
For the second year in a row, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival was a huge success. Here's an iPhone photo of me reading with Cave Canem. Special thanks to Jarita Davis for setting up the event, and Afaa Michael Weaver for doing the introductions. **** My two readings happened in the same location—a church, as you can see by the photo. My first reading with Tapsetry of Voices, a Boston-based...
CHROMA (Free subscription) | 10/17/2009
New York City Boy : A Conversation with Edmund White, on the US publication of City Boy, 9th October 2009 By Richard Canning Photo of Edmund White in Venice in 1974, with Alfred Corn (left) and David Kalstone (right) RC: You open with a description of 70s New York: 'grungy, dangerous, bankrupt' but artistically in its zenith. That's pretty evidently meant to contrast with present-day Manhattan. Are...
Poet Mom (Free subscription) | 10/16/2009
How lucky to be included with these poets! The North Shore was one of eight venues across the state kicking of the second annual Massachusetts Poetry Festival. It was a packed house in Salem, as we read poems by Massachusetts poets along with a few of our own. The evening was hosted by J.D. Scrimgeour (front, right center, green sweater) and Claire Keyes (second row, right, red jacket). I felt very...
Stick Poet Super Hero (Free subscription) | 10/15/2009
Do you ever wonder what the worst writing of the best writers looks like? Those poems and scratching that never make it. Aborted poems. A year ago or so there was a book published with some of Elizabeth Bishops unpublished work. "Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments," by Elizabeth Bishop a collection of her material which drew a lot of criticism because...
Poet Mom (Free subscription) | 10/14/2009
Join me at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival! I’m a triple threat—reading at three venues during the four-day event. Visit the Mass Poetry Web site for info on all of the wonderful events. Some readings and workshops have sold out, so reserve your seats today. *Most of the events are FREE.* How’s that for the creative economy? Here’s where you can catch me during the weekend....
DCist (Free subscription) | 10/12/2009
Timothy Mix (Ford) in the Jealousy Aria, Falstaff, Washington National Opera (photo by Karin Cooper) On Saturday night, Washington National Opera opened the second production of its downsized fall season, Verdi's Falstaff . The regrettable postponement of the company's American Ring Cycle led to a hasty but resourceful reconfiguration of this year's programming, quickly putting together a group of...
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 10/09/2009
On July 24, 1965, less than three months before his death, Randall Jarrell published “Speaking of Books,” ostensibly a list of suggestions for summer reading, in The New York Times Book Review . The essay, in fact, is a distillation of a life’s engagement with books. Read with the knowledge of Jarrell’s imminent death, it’s a poignant human document but we shouldn’t...
Bloody Ice Cream (Free subscription) | 10/05/2009
Read the whole essay here . The teacher of my first creative writing class was very encouraging; I signed up for his poetry workshop in the fall, a brief respite from rehearsal and practice rooms. Over the next year, as music slowly receded into the background, he came into the foreground as my mentor. He was queer, which was likely one reason why he was as kind to me as he was, but he was not a feminist....
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 10/05/2009
“The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are: Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery .” Alice Quinn, the editor of Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments , tells us the poet wrote this in the late fifties or early sixties, in a notebook entry that begins “Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill...
One Poet's Notes (Free subscription) | 10/05/2009
I have always been fascinated by the manner in which older and established poets or artists have served as mentors for those just beginning to learn their craft. In recent decades, many of those relationships have developed in the formal setting of the university creative writing programs, places where students choose to be guided by authors on the faculty. I know I have been grateful for the counsel...
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