Holding On: Ridiculous Light by Valencia Robin
The poems of Ridiculous Light are wary of hope yet keep thrumming toward it.
...more
Posts Tagged: Gerald Stern
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Pandora and the Naked Dead Woman
Bite that apple, open that jar at your own risk and see how your garden grows, how hopeful you remain. Paradise is, after all, blissful self-ignorance.
...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Couple of Puzzles
This was the first pure poetry I ever knew. Sung out loud more or less to no one on a theme of longing. Wife. Sons. Rags. Snow. Stalks of corn.
...more
In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern
Having never read Gerald Stern’s poetry before, I took This Time: New and Selected Poems out from the library. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and it deserves it; the poems are consistently charming, witty, disarmingly beautiful, and full of a kind of tongue-in-cheek, Eastern European wisdom and worldliness that seems part […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Gerald Stern
There’s a black and white photo in which the poet Stanley Kunitz lovingly holds Gerald Stern’s cheeks in both hands. It’s 1990. They’re looking into one another, and Kunitz says, “You’re the wilderness in American poetry.”
...more