Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Tradition and the Individual's Urges: Notes on T.S. Eliot

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The new semester is upon me, and I find myself feverishly tapping out various course documents for my students.  I'm getting a...
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Thursday, January 10, 2013

Fooling a Butterfly: Poetry and (Kinda, Sorta) Belief

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Nabokov hoping to fool some butterflies A few days ago, over on Facebook, Barry Schwabsky  responded to my recent post about Robert Du...
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Sunday, January 06, 2013

“That’s a Real Angel You’re Talking To”: Robert Duncan and Mythological Consciousness

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“You know, that’s a real angel you’re talking to.” It was a couple of years ago, at a reception in Chicago’s Green Lantern Gallery, tha...
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Saturday, December 29, 2012

Ted Schaefer, Poet and Colleague, R.I.P.

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It's been a couple of weeks since I heard the sad news that my former colleague, the poet Ted Schaefer,  had left us.  He was a good...
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Friday, December 28, 2012

The Plonsker Prize: $10,000, Your Book Published, and Two Months to Write at Lake Forest College

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In A Room of One's Own  Virginia Woolf famously said that a writer who hoped to succeed needed  £500 a year and private room in whic...
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Tuesday, December 18, 2012

What I Read While They Were Writing

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Lake Forest College, where I’ve been teaching for something like sixteen years, minus sabbaticals and a visiting year in Sweden, pri...
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Saturday, December 15, 2012

James Bond is no longer a Greek God, he’s Jesus: Notes on Skyfall

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The first thing to notice about James Bond is that he’s a god.   I’m not talking about the James Bond of Ian Fleming’s nov...
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Friday, December 07, 2012

Us vs. Them: Poetry and the Limits of Binary Thinking

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Experimental vs. formalist; formalist vs. free verse; post-avant vs. quietude; lyric vs. language-based — you know the old binaries that...
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