First things first: you don’t have to be a fan of Weldon Kees to enjoy this book. Shameful confession: until I read the note that precedes the table of contents,…
This week I’ve been reading a lot about illness. I read this stunning essay by Barry Silesky, poet and longtime editor of ACM, in the Missouri Review, in tandem with Bob Flanagan’s The Pain Journal.…
I don’t really want to know what a man looks like when his face has been cannibalized. I don’t really want to know about this dog-breastfeeding woman. I don’t want to be in the position of being able to judge or ridicule the ugliness and the strangeness of this world.
The translation of poetry requires justification. Not necessarily for conceptual reasons, but because the experience of reading translated poetry however transcendent and beautiful always feels lacking, incomplete, like living in…
All of a sudden my inbox is filling up with links from friends to two essays related to poetry that have almost everything and nothing in common at once, and…
Here’s hoping more people read the concise and precise interview about translation up on Guernica between Erica Wright and Marilyn Hacker. When we talk about someone being a prolific translator,…
In 2003, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released “Nocturama.” I love almost every record The Bad Seeds have released, but with “Nocturama,” I was disappointed. I listened over and…