it unfolds in conversation with your work, Harvey. Each section is titled after one of your books and unfolds in dialogue with your poetry. I directly address you throughout the poem in the same way that I address William Heyen in is the author of four poetry volumes including, most recently, the book-length poem, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). His other poetry collections are: What Monsters You Make of Them (Etruscan Press, 2019); and As for my own writing, I just finished a collection of poems similar my first three books in style and content. I also finished the first draft of anoth ..read more

A beautifully produced little book of collaborations (or what the authors call “twoness” poems) has just been published. Called We Eclipse into the Other Side , the book, by Miho Kinnas & Ethelbert Miller, is filled with gorgeous short poems marked by a potent synthesis of mystery and clarity, as in these two ..read more

I knew none of these things. How could I know? I was a fifteen-year-old boy. All I knew, standing in that line in Auschwitz, was that my father, Joseph Grünfeld; my mother, Tzyvia; my sisters, Simcha and Rivka; my five-year-old baby brother, Sruel Baer; and I, Maximilian, were in trouble and far from home.  Measure of a Man, A Memoir: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents' Tailor by Martin Greenfield with Wynton Hall.  ..read more

from the archive; first posted September 18, 2016 —it's not a surrender of the Body to the Christ of Poetry so much as it is a wish that Poetry could somehow summon the world with the strength of a Body. “Flickering,” the earliest poem I wrote for for Tupelo and the press asked me to write a brief description of it that I realized the quest for a city “with water for cleaning and drinking” and “bread to quiet hunger” had become the thread that holds the book together. So, if you’re not wont to read books of poetry from the beginning, do turn to “The City” and read its fifteen lines aloud. I di ..read more

                            # # # is this any worse than before A Thursday. Rainy. The sociopoem smelled of Paco Rabanne— so English-lyrically, well-anthologized, and attractive, seemed to have a form in the columns for those saved, those lost, sold or free. I sought a restraining order against the sociopathic I am haunted by the thought Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? A Cologne for Men— and was devilishly handsome, so elegant, in the rescue, in the naming to stab Doro ..read more

: This was writen long before the concept of the thought police was put into practrice under a variety of euphemistic names. Is it a crime to misuse a word? Of course not. Lehman writes, "Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.” in the first six months of this year (for example, a song "sounds as if it were written by Chuck Berry in a decidedly existential frame of mind," and a vote for Jerry Brown "is an existential ..read more

from the archive, first posted October 4, 2008       In quest forever of the perfect ..read more

    I have always felt Fitzgerald (“the rich are different from you and me’) was right in his exchange with Hemingway (“yes, they have more money”). It is not money alone that separates the social classes. Manners count. For lessons and examples, consult “East Side Story.” It will make you want to read half a dozen other novels by Louis Auchincloss. century to set up a branch of what his son Peter quaintly calls “the family thread business ..read more

How good it is to have a corrective to the view that Trilling no longer need concern us. Writers have scored off Trilling because they sense something "oppressive" in his work ("We can't help feeling that we should be improved by Trilling, and this feeling is itself inevitably oppressive"). There has also been a steady stream of curious ad hominem dismissals ("he was depressive, he had writer's block, and he drank too much")  There are reasons that Trilling, in his pedagogy no less than in his writing, had so profound an effect on those of us who were lucky enough to work closely with him ..read more

I knew none of these things. How could I know? I was a fifteen-year-old boy. All I knew, standing in that line in Auschwitz, was that my father, Joseph Grünfeld; my mother, Tzyvia; my sisters, Simcha and Rivka; my five-year-old baby brother, Sruel Baer; and I, Maximilian, were in trouble and far from home.  Measure of a Man, A Memoir: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents' Tailor by Martin Greenfield with Wynton Hall.  ..read more