In her memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo emphasizes the young Bob Dylan’s “fever to learn”: making pilgrimages to hear legends, hanging around his peers to pick up their songs and arrangements, occasionally using said arrangements on his own records before said peers got the chance. According to another source, Dylan at least once absconded with a friend’s rare vinyl because he needed it. In The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Dave Van Ronk honors Dylan’s seriousness and talent but is very funny about Dylan’s constant storytelling and persona-building: “I mean, one night he spent something li ..read more

I confess to being a planner by temperament, but some of the best moments of any trip are serendipity. I’m just back from 2 1/2 weeks in Scotland, where one of my most poetic encounters was turning the corner onto Rose Street in Edinburgh, feeling tired and looking for somewhere to eat, and spotting a kind of writing on the wall–a series of cut steel panels, image and text. “Wait,” I said, “that’s a poem. Wait, that’s a GOOD poem.” It turned out to be “Beachcomber” by George Mackay Brown, whose multigenre book An Orkney Tapestry I described in my last post. Read about the mural’s creation ..read more

Sick for much of the last few weeks, I became a literary twister, pulling in a lot of reading and flinging out a few things, too. I’m not in poetry submission mode, except for a couple of residency applications. Instead, I’m occupying the quiet eye of a poetry storm by preparing a book for publication, which for me dovetails with the early summer-energy of cleaning up and getting organized after a stressful year. The book is my sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic, now scheduled for release on the auspicious-sounding March 4th, 2025 (though I’m having flashbacks to the inauspicious timing of my ..read more

Mini-interview below with Nat Goldberg and Chris Gavaler on the occasion of their latest publication. Topics range from Star Trek to hybrid poems to literary collaboration to the Church of America. Enjoy! LW: Congratulations on the debut of your great new book Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain the World. A question that always interests me: what’s your deep reason for writing it? I read it as philosophy for laypeople, taking on examples of wide interest from history, law, science, and more, a lot of them saturated with culture wars controversy. You write ..read more

Gregory Pardlo, paraphrased, from a staged conversation with Allison Joseph: I know I might sound like a hypocrite, but don’t worry about the prizes; there’s so much compromise and chance in the process. Just keep doing your thing and saying yes to opportunities. Conferences have a program and an underprogram. Between events I talk to old and new friends about literary scandals, how beautiful their readings were, traveling after losing your partner, how to nurse along an injured knee, the poetry prizes we long to win someday, the journals that charge for submission but publish almost entirel ..read more

Spring proceeds peony by heavy-headed peony. With satisfaction and struggle, I’ve mostly finished the editorial part of the season, although we’re now proofing Shenandoah‘s Spring issue. I’ll be off the hook for a while, except for the relatively moderate workload of running the annual Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Writers, because I’ve now set the poetry lists for Fall ’24 and Spring ’25, and two editorial fellows will select the poems for Fall ’25 and Spring ’26. While editing poetry for Shenandoah is a privilege, it’s also a LOT, and I’ll be launching my next poetry book, Mycocosmic, in ..read more

“Poet or poem or reader, the same/ ectoplasm,” Diane Seuss writes in her latest collection. I’m reading and writing poetry with ardor again, feeling that welcome ectoplasmic connection. I don’t know if my creative brain is clicking into gear because of the season (I often go dormant in winter and start writing again in the spring), or because I’m teaching three poetry-related classes that are now at peak energy before the end-of-term slide to home (but not before my class puts on a Haiku Death Match!–see the flier below). In any case, the ability to channel poetry again is welcome. A few notes ..read more

This video is of a random person we watched on a quiet beach on our four-night trip to Aruba: a parasailer gliding back and forth for an hour, occasionally leaping or dipping into the Caribbean but mostly just writing his verse across the horizon, left to right and calmly back again as the sun set behind him. There was a casino-high-rise section in Aruba that we visited and got the hell out of fast; we stayed elsewhere, in a family-owned hotel that hadn’t been “updated,” and were glad. Highlights: a national park with caves and Arawak petroglyphs; good restaurants in Oraanjestad; and simply r ..read more

January 25th Last night I finished Forbidden Notebook by Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes. Yes, I steal time for pleasure reading even on school nights, when I can. This novel was a Christmas gift from a good friend, and knowing zero about the writer (or translator Ann Goldstein), I had no sense of the world I’d be entering. The main character, a forty-three-year-old woman in post-World War II Italy, lives with her husband and two adult children in a cramped apartment, cooking them three meals a day and doing all of life’s grunt work while also holding down an office job. She defines hers ..read more

I have zero plans for New Year’s Eve: I don’t care enough about the midnight moment to stay up past bedtime, plus we just returned from visiting my sister in Florida (my family of 4 in an economy car for 12 hours each way), and we’re all tired. But introspection IS my jam, so like everyone else, I’m pondering the year behind me and imagining the year ahead. 2023 was framed by sorrow. Personally, it began in argument with my brother and the late-January realization that he’d scammed my sister and me, pretending my mother’s small bequest was legally tied up when he had already taken control of t ..read more