Three poems (read by me) at the end of Brooklyn Rail’s NSE #581: “I Dreamt the Landscape Was Looking at Me: Jessica Mitrani” (an artist’s talk)

On Youtube.

Note: The whole shmakunga is an hour and a half. I come in at the end—1:15:20. The poems are: “Like a Cloud Above a Ravine,” “Baby Snake Signs with a Flourish,” and “Brown Bear Is a Confiding Schoolgirl.”

   Also, one tip. The host asks Mitrani a question at 1:04:47, and the answer Mitrani gives is prolly the best thing in the whole ninety minutes. She gets more and more excited. Also, a little bit later, there’s a woman with glasses that are square on one side and round on the other.

[originally posted on YouTube Friday 24 June 2022]

Here’s something pleasant.

This Australian guy, Chris Andrews, has written a book (How to Do Things with Forms: The Oulipo and its Inventions) and used a quote from one of my poems as its last sentence.

The line is from “They Have Build a Public Fountain,” from I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium, 2012).

[How to Do Things with Forms will be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, September 2022]

Review of Runes Across the North Sea from the Migration Period and Beyond: An Annotated Edition of the Old Frisian Runic Corpus, by Livia Kaiser

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: See, the whole point of the angular, boxy shapes of the letters in the runic alphabet was that such shapes can more easily be scratched or cut into wood or bone or even rocks. Take an X-acto knife and try to cut a zero into a piece of plastic. Hard as hell to do those curves! Now cut a “1” or an “X.” Piece of cake. Savor this moment, child. You are beholding the very warrant for the runic alphabet. (That’s also why it has no horizontal strokes. If you start cutting gashes along the grain of the wood, you risk cracking the wood.)

[originally posted Sunday 20 February 2022]

Review of Family Instructions for the Yan Clan and Other Works by Yan Zhitui (531–590s)

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: An important nobleman in the south once read a defective copy of the commentary on “The Rhapsody on the Shu Capital.” In the gloss “The ‘squatting owl’ refers to yam,” “yam” (yu) is mistakenly copied as “lamb” (yang). Then someone gave the nobleman some lamb, and he wrote back saying, “Thank you for gracing me with the squatting owl.” The entire court was shocked, having no idea what it meant. Only much later did people manage to trace the error and come to understand.

[originally posted Sunday 27 March 2022]

In which I am interviewed by a 15-yr-old South Korean girl (Nayul Kim) about love, under color of my supposedly knowing all about it ’cuz I’m a poet

On Youtube.

Note: For some reason, when you click on this thing, it doesn’t start at the beginning. You have to manually move the little thingy. Also, this was a school project. Nayul (known as Yuri) edited the footage and added the images. The original interview was like 45 minutes. Here it’s like ten.

[originally posted Wednesday 17 December 2021]

Review of Disintegration Made Plain and Easy, by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: In poetry, what happens is we teach ourselves that a good line is one that can be detached from the poem and admired for its own sake—either for what it says, or how it sounds, or both. Such is the “real stuff” of poetry, especially if a tone of intelligence and control is maintained. On the other hand, there are the “entertainments,” which comprise everything where there is no pretense of poise, and the goodness of the work depends on what I call “moves”…

[originally posted Monday 10 January 2022]

Rubaʿi

At Blazing Stadium (have to scroll).

Teaser quote: I love Alexis de Tocqueville…

[originally posted Sunday 2 January 2022]

Rubaʿi

At Blazing Stadium (have to scroll).

Teaser quote: One is trying to get something out of a coat pocket…

[originally posted Saturday 4 December 2021]

Review of Emily Kendal Frey’s Lovability

For Rhino.


Teaser quote: I want you to take a second and think about the special case of The Book that Proves Your Ideas About Poetry Were Wrong.


[originally posted Sunday 15 August 2021]

“Chipette and Atalisa,” by Nadya Pittendrigh

At Blazing Stadium (have to scroll).


Teaser quote: You’re an overnight houseguest who can’t find anything to eat, walks to an all-night grocery, winds up smoking cigarettes and ordering a lot of stuff on Amazon, and makes everyone listen to an explanation of your “experiment” at the breakfast table.


[originally posted Tuesday 13 July 2021]

Review of Taxi Night, by Cliff Fyman

At Rhino.


Teaser quote: In 1998, I bought a crappy little homemade photocopied poetry ’zine in Manhattan. I didn’t open it ’til I got it home; it was three dollars. Most of it was just what you’d expect: skateboarder poetry. But there was one poem in it that I considered such a jewel of wit that I retyped it and emailed it to sixty or seventy people; I redd it over the phone to people; I redd it to my students. For twenty years, I talked about it to poets, friends… You’ve never heard of it. It’s called “What You Can Learn from Beowulf.”


[originally posted Saturday 10 July 2021]