Rhyming is not natural | 21 Nov 2009

At an absorbing informal meeting of a dozen people at a faculty/graduate-student reading group on poetry yesterday, we talked about a half dozen different topics that came up from our reading of two poems by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and different translations of those poems by Langston Hughes and Achy Obejas, and also about [...]

Ed Roberson’s new book | 15 Nov 2009

Ed Roberson’s new book of poems, The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse Press, 2009), opens with these lines: I entered as a man enters a labyrinth,      seeing from hairline fracture to abyss the magnified whisper of memory      not finish its sentence whole [...] Roberson is the master of a hauntingly [...]

ye ye yai ye ya i ya ye yai ya | 2 Nov 2009

Looking up from the work on my desk—the pleasing, illuminating but demanding scrutiny of draft translations by Spanish poet and translator Jordi Doce of some of my poems for a small bilingual edition to be published in Spain by Littera Libros—I see in the books around me so many extraneous attractions, distractions.  Projects as yet [...]
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