Cricket, Lovely Cricket March 13, 2007: Sometimes living in America is like living in a bubble. March Madness is the great excitement right now (apart from American Idol), and there is a strange assumption that this madness is international—that the world is somehow involved with this madness. Well, it isn’t. In Jamaica right now, there is another excitement. In fact, through out [...] by Kwame Dawes

Wow. Whew. March 13, 2007: Just stumbled in from the first day of a residency with 9th and 10th graders. I am beyond exhausted. I had to dig beneath a veritable mountain of Uggs, belly rings, retro jerseys, Sidekicks and Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts to reach the kids, but they were there. I'd forgotten how good this feels. More later. And here's a literary journaI I like a [...] by Patricia Smith

The fair New Yorker is, sometimes, very amusing… March 13, 2007: Play with Wave Book's erasures. Context be damned. by Fred Sasaki

MFA—Much Friggin’ Angst… March 12, 2007: I’m not sure, but I think the creative multitudes who applied for MFA programs now hold yea or nay letters in their hot little hands. Alas, THE decision must be made. I’ve already received omigod calls from friends who never thought they’d get in but now they’re in omigod and suddenly they’re either too good or not good enough and maybe [...] by Patricia Smith

One of Those Really Typical Blogs March 12, 2007: Many friends of mine who write say that teaching sucks them of any writing energy. They work hard to protect themselves from having all their creative energy sucked out of them by their students. One responded to the idea of doing writing exercises in class with the students will disbelief. He would never do that. He had to protect his art. [...] by Kwame Dawes

creating a syllabus March 12, 2007: Someone asked me about the books that appear on my syllabus. For one class this semester, (I teach two), it was easy: I let the students pick half the list. The class is a year-long undergrad workshop, with only seven students. Over the fall semester, they impressed me so much with their poems and hard work and seriousness that I allowed each [...] by Jeffrey McDaniel

Write Where You Are March 12, 2007: Greetings from planet progesterone! I just entered the third trimester of pregnancy and am feeling round and slow and stupid. I use the word “stupid” despite it being a no-no in the motherhood (“stupid,” like “poop,” is so terrifically repeatable) because it captures my current state quite accurately. I’m not saying that all [...] by Rachel Zucker

What I Wrote to an African American Friend Today About Race and Art March 12, 2007: Your question about African American writing is a fascinating one: “Will we ever be able to consider the works of African-American writers sans the reminder that they are in fact African-American?” In 1926, Langston Hughes dealt with something like this question in his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”.You should find it [...] by Kwame Dawes

Fourteen thousand poetry readers can’t be wrong—or can they? March 11, 2007: [Solzhenitsyn] must have vividly remembered how in 1958, a few years before he himself was embraced by the Soviet literary establishment, a crowd of 14,000 was bused by the authorities to Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow to denounce Pasternak as an enemy of the people after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. One could describe this [...] by Ed Park

POEMS THAT LAST TAKE TWO March 10, 2007: I just discovered that I have written about the idea of posterity through art already. In a sense, I have not yet finished talking about this topic. Jeffrey McDaniel’s last insightful blog on The Best American Poetry 1919, nicely reminds us of the stark reality about what remains and what is lost in time. I am reminded that there is a tension [...] by Kwame Dawes