Commentary |
on The Importance of Music to Girls, a memoir by Lavinia Greenlaw
I enrolled in ROTC in September, 1968, but I don’t remember why, or what it felt like to make that decision. All I can dredge up are scattered images. But the story is notorious among my family and friends who retell it, adding nuances and imputations along the way. Their narrative constitutes my memory. Signing…
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Poet’s Bookshelf II (Barnwood Press), The Music Lover’s Anthology (Persea Books), and Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath Press)
Poets Bookshelf II: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art, edited by Peter Davis and Tom Koontz (Barnwood Press) This collection is the follow-up to Poets Bookshelf which Barnwood Press published in 2005. The first book included 81 poets. Poets Bookshelf II features 101 poets listing and commenting on the poets and titles that…
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on Creatures of a Day, poems by Reginald Gibbons (LSU Press)
The eleven-part poem “Fern-Texts” that completes Reginald Gibbon’s eighth book of poems, Creatures of a Day, begins with a passage from the notebooks of Coleridge. This entry from 1804 describes “two sorts of talkative fellows”: “The first sort is of those who use five hundred words more [than] there needs to express an idea –…
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on Another World Instead, early poems of William Stafford, edited by Fred Marchant
As an editor of a little magazine in the mid-1970s, I wrote to Bill Stafford asking if he would send some work. He responded with a batch of a dozen poems. Soon he became a regular contributor. The bulky packets would arrive a few times a year, and I would publish a poem or two.…
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on Circadian, poems by Joanna Klink
I think I know what Dean Young means when he blurbs that Joanna Klink’s second book, Circadian, displays “a Dickinsonian desire for a meeting of minds and a reverence for the natural world.” Klink’s speaker is a rapt solitary, dominated by landscapes that intrude on the senses, who seeks not so much to be understood…
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Frank Sinatra: The Man, The Music, The Legend, essays edited by Jeanne Fuchs and Ruth Prigozy
I was in Milan on business on May 14, 1998, the day Frank Sinatra died at age 82. The story topped the national news broadcast. Visiting Germany, President Clinton responded to a reporter’s question about Sinatra and America. Then Clinton went on to discuss new U.S. sanctions against India, which had just exploded a nuclear…
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on The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, poems by Marie Howe
Born in 1950, Marie Howe started writing poetry when she was thirty. In 1983 she earned an MFA from Columbia University, and in 1987 Persea Books published The Good Thief, her first book. The intensities of strapped-in emotion, signatures of her work over time, were already evident in those early poems, animated by the discovery…
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on The Soul Thief, a novel by Charles Baxter
“A great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction – from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little,” writes James Woods in How Fiction Works. “My own taste tends towards the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their…
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on On Eloquence, by Denis Donoghue (Yale University Press)
The term “eloquence” doesn’t offer much utility to literary critics these days. We think of eloquent orators – and almost reflexively we become guarded, following Bertrand Russell’s advice that “to acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.” Perhaps with this habitual recoil in mind, Denis Donoghue begins…
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on Earthly, poems by Erica Funkhouser
Asked why he wrote so few poems, William Meredith replied that “poetry and experience should have an exact ratio … Daily experience is astonishing on a level at which you can write a poem, but astonishing experience would be the experience which is not astonishment of reality but astonishment of insight.” Since the insights are…
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on The Baseball Field at Night, last poems by Patricia Goedicke
When I finally met Patricia Goedicke in 1982 after several years of correspondence, she had already been dealing with breast cancer for five years. She was exactly one year and a day younger than my mother, and there she sat at a table in a Cambridge restaurant, provoking and teasing, wanting to know everything, praising,…
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on About My Life and the Kept Woman, a memoir by John Rechy
The power and deceptions of identities, perceived and assumed, have long been preoccupations of John Rechy. Born in El Paso in 1934, he grew up in a segregated city where Latino families lived on one side of the tracks. His mother was Mexican. His father, an accomplished musician and conductor during his days in Mexico,…
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on White Towers by Paul Hirshorn and Steven Izenour
“I loved the taste of those burgers. There was something about the combination of the grilled hamburger meat, chopped unions and the pickle. I consider myself an aficionado after sitting in the Bridge Plaza White Tower and having a couple burgers and coffee every night for most of February and March, 1948, as I was…
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on The Gift by Lewis Hyde
I received my copy of The Gift as a gift from a poet friend, David Clewell, in 1983. Poets have been passing the book around for 25 years for two main reasons. First, there is the book's advocacy for the creative economy, the notion that the gift of art (“no effort in the world can…