Skip to main content

August 2023

 Completed:

John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson, Decreation
Anders Carlson-Wee, The Low Passions
Franny Choi, Soft Science
Louise Gluck, Averno
Julian Gewirtz, Your Face My Flag
Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson
Joanna Klink, Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
Dong Li, The Orange Tree
Rowan Riccardo Philips, Heaven
Lee Ann Roripaugh, tsunami vs. the fukushima 50
Adam Scheffler, Heartworm
Solmaz Sharif, Customs
Danez Smith, Homie
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler
Mai der Vang, Afterland
Jenny Xie, The Rupture Tense
Monica Youn, Blackacre (reread)


In progress:

Daniel Borzutsky, The Performance of Becoming Human
Dionne Brand, Nomenclature
Alex Dimitrov, Together and by Ourselves
Louise Gluck, Proofs and Theories
Jorie Graham, Runaway
Susan Howe, Quarry
Carl Philips, Then the War: Selected Poems
Lisa Robertson, Magenta Soul Whip
Mai der Vang, Yellow Rain
C.D. Wright, One Big Self

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

greatness

The NY Times has run an excellent article on greatness in poetry. It's always interesting to read NY Times on poetry -- there was a fascinating one about Jorie Graham's entrance to Harvard (Valhalla?) -- because NY Times believes in poetry, but is egoistic enough to be upset when it's confronted with something it doesn't understand. That's a very useful quality, because it respectfully/hesitantly calls a pear a pear, instead of some helium-filled blather. Maybe because of it, the article anointed only one great post-Eliot poet: Elizabeth Bishop. I'm pleased and agree. (There was some noise about Ashbery, but we'll see what happens 20 years after he's dead, which means in roughly 10 years. I mean, 21.) The criterion that article settled on for greatness is: “demonstrating the qualities that make poetry seem interesting and worthwhile to such a degree that subsequent practitioners of the art form have found her work a more useful resource than the work ...
1 comment
Read more

Shiji (史记)

A. Sima Qian's account in his seminal 史记 ( Shiji , History Record - usually translated as 'Records of the Grand Historian') of six assassins is probably the most absorbing part of that work. But why would Sima Qian devote a section on commoners in a work that otherwise considers only nobility and rulers? Perhaps the better question is: what's the effect of this inclusion on us?
1 comment
Read more

summer reading (Richard Hugo)

Richard Hugo is most famous for this devastating little villanelle, called The Freaks at Spurgin Field Road . I just finished his first book, A Run of Jacks . I'd no idea it was his first book. I'll excerpt two stanzas from a poem called "Northwest Retrospective: Mark Tobey." (Mark Tobey was a painter.) Beyond Van Allen rings, the stars don't glitter, arrogant as moons. When did we start? Light-years ago. Why did we come? No matter. We are not returning to that world of ditch and strain, the research terms: cryogenic fuels, free radicals, plasma jets, coordinated fusion. Only the last, in all this void, applies. A universe is fusing in our eyes.
1 comment
Read more