There’s been much blog ado over The New Yorker‘s “Summer Fiction: 20 Under 40.” Check out the gnashing here, here and here (we promise to complain more in a later post). However the writers learned their craft, they learned to write first sentences well. In fact, we found the lead sentence…
First Lines of the 20 Under 40
Whatever else they've learned in MFA programs, the New Yorker's celebrated (sorta-) young writers learned the art of leading with their chins.
June 19th, 2010 · No Comments
Tags: The Rabbit Rants
Looking Back With Philip Levine
Memory serves the voice of the voiceless.
March 19th, 2010 · No Comments
Old men deserve memory. Philip Levine has a good one and he knows how to put it to use. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, at 83, still finds his past to be fertile, as he has for some 50 years. But there’s something new in News of…
Tags: Book Reviews
Song of Myself
Raymond Carver's poetry sheds light on his self-absorption
March 16th, 2010 · No Comments
Not to be forgotten in any consideration of Raymond Carver is his poetry. Mostly written in the last ten sober years of his life, the poems support the notion of the self-absorbed Carver that Carol Sklenicka’s recent biography suggests. Never one to admire poets dependent on “I” as subject for each…
Tags: Book Reviews · The Rabbit Rants
Village Takes
Poet Louise Gluck's scenes from a not-so-simple life.
February 14th, 2010 · No Comments
Louise Gluck’s 11th volume of poetry is a litany of contrasts and their affect the human condition: mountain and meadow, fog and light, village and city. The poems are pinned to the cycles of light and dark, sun and moon, soul and body. When she makes a conclusion, she finds…
Tags: Book Reviews
Flat-Earth Theory
The ABCs of John Ashbery
January 16th, 2010 · No Comments
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,”…
Tags: Book Reviews
Fall From On High
Facing job loss, foreclosure and his wife's cheating, an aspiring poet seeks redemption in marijuana sales.
November 26th, 2009 · 1 Comment
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.…
Tags: Book Reviews
A Star’s Light
The poems in W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius shine a small light in search of illumination.
September 7th, 2009 · No Comments
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…
Tags: Book Reviews
