John Ashbery, now 82, has said that his goal is “to produce a poem that the critic can’t even talk about.” Planisphere proves that he keeps trying, even as the critics keep talking. Helen Vendler finds meaning in Planisphere’s title. She notes that it comes from Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,”…

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Like much of Nick Hornby’s work, Juliet, Naked is not a book about love in the traditional sense. It’s a book for those of us who are obsessively in love with music, so much in love that it defines us when so little else does. We identify with someone’s art, and…

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The Rabbit, nose a wiggle, is aghast that Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice hasn’t been included in any “Best Of” year-end lists he’s seen. It’s Thomas Pynchon for Carrot’s sake! Full disclosure: The author has been at the top of the Rabbit’s living-writer list since the dumb bunny first read Gravity’s…

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On your toes now and no sleep walking! You don’t venture into the English village of  Land’s End  in which everyone suffers from narcolepsy with your eyes closed! Especially when that nightmare of nightmares, the stereotypically insidious and ethnically evil Dr. Fu Manchu is  tearing open someone’s bowels just beyond your…

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Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets told of the struggles of some 50 of his contemporary 18th-century English versifiers, John Milton, Alexander Pope and John Dryden among them. Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets is the brutally-comic tale of aspiring contemporary poet, laid-off business reporter and family man Matthew Prior.…

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When we last saw Duane Moore in Larry McMurtry’s 2007 novel When the Light Goes, he was a sixty-something malcontent who had just found age-old happiness with a much younger woman. When we first saw him back in 1966, in McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, he was a sexually confused…

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Reading Rhino Ranch, the latest installment in Larry McMurtry’s on-going Duane Moore saga that began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show, was a bit of deja-vu all over again. The last three books of the series are of a sort. The town of Thalia is still dying. Sexual frustration continues…

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The publicity around the recent death of TV pitchman Billy Mays reminded us of the popularity of the infomercial culture. The rumors that cocaine was involved in May’s death are easily believed in a profession where hyperactivity is a plus. Sure, lots of celebrities have shilled for various products of…

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I have with me/all that I do not know/I have lost none of it

W.S Merwin “The Nomad Flute” from The Shadow of Sirius

Sometime in the mid 1960s, W. S. Merwin completely lost faith in punctuation and came to believe in his readers. The transformation didn’t happen all at once. The…

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The Rabbit had his nose in Chicago Tribune rock critic and Sound Opinions co-host Greg Kot’s Ripped: How The Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (Scribner) when New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s lament on the demise of the music industry came out. Blow’s piece “Swan Songs?” is a short critique of events that have…

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