Rebecca Wolff

Name That Goon

It took me about two seconds to name the unexpected speaking voice of poet/critic/professor Joshua Clover as I flicked past the NPR station. I flicked back. He was being interviewed because today he’s going on strike! Or at least walking out. We wish him well.

09.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (14)

Joel Brouwer

SpeedReviews(TM)

Poetry magazine people: How many review copies of poetry books do y’all receive? It must be bargeloads, because I’m just one low-rent sometime-freelancer who writes maybe five or six reviews a year, and I get something like, I don’t know, probably six or eight review copies a month. Some from presses, some from the poets themselves. Let there be no doubt about this: I’m wildly grateful to receive this bounty. The sight of a book-sized envelope in my mailbox has always given me a thrill, and I don’t see that state of things changing any time soon. No way, though, will I ever have the opportunity to review but the smallest fraction of these babies, and the unshakeable-no-matter-how-hard-I-try Midwestern Calvinist ethic of my childhood demands I experience guilt over this fact.

09.23.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (28)

Rebecca Wolff

Cleve-Land

Back from reading at Cleveland State University on Thursday. It was hard to follow Kate Greenstreet–she has the most ingratiatingly nearsighted stage presence. You really feel as though she is speaking to you–Because she is! In various deft registers of notation and declamation and preoccupation. She’s on this massive, amazing, awe-inspiring reading tour. Please go see her if she’s coming to a venue near you and I bet she is.

09.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Tonya Foster

Ramadan Rosh Hashana New Moon 1

A word’s an act, and no one can recover it.
Sometimes the thing we name
suddenly becomes…what? A being, almost
human, that the very calling kills”
from Heather McHugh’s “The Magician” in To The Quick

-copied in one of my notebook, among my notes on the social geography and history of New Orleans.

This morning was cold. Cooler than it’s been in a while. Weather is not metaphor. But I make those connections anyway with trails and emotions that have cooled. Scent and heat (and their absence). The marked police car is back on the corner. (What are those expectations about? Yes, to the dangling preposition, my morning affirmation.) Am enjoying this measure of detachment that the cool calls up. And besides, I’m a winter birth. “We think by feeling. What is there to know?” Of course, we also feel by thinking. And to know requires that we somehow touch. Here, I picture Anne Bancroft spelling words (signing) in Patty Duke’s finally understanding palms. First water, then ground, then pump, tree, step.

09.19.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Joel Brouwer

Being Here

“Here” at the University of Alabama’s creative writing program we’ve been enjoying this week the company of poet Juliana Spahr. Scare quotes exhaustively (and perhaps exhaustingly) explained after the jump.

09.18.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (17)