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Manuscript

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Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time reworking my manuscript, ordering and reordering, adding and removing poems, trying to shape it into something that’s more than just a coherent collection.  I want my book to feel like a particular kind of experience, one that develops unexpectedly as it

Jean Rhys and Wide Sargasso Sea

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Widely read in English department post-colonial courses, Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the life of “the madwoman in the attic” of Jane Eyre and suggests the background of her madness. The book is divided into three parts, narrated by Antoinette Cosway (who becomes Bertha Mason) and Rochester. But the book

Compost Season

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It’s that time again.  My university’s semester has ended, and while this does not, alas, mean that I’ve logged any hammock time, nor that all my interns for August are placed, nor yet that a certain grisly assessment report is approved by all relevant parties…it does mean opening the

Culinary Art

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The shapely tesserae of a well-chopped onion.  Butter and flour foaming into roux.  The beauty of texture, the formal grace: the rough seed husk and the slippery seed.  Precision in small things.  The hours spent simmering and adjusting, simmering and stirring till the earth is in it.  Knifecraft; the

“In a Pig’s Eye:” Why I Reread “Rock Springs”

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By the time I first read “Rock Springs” by Richard Ford, I had already crossed the country seven times by car, four of them through the eponymous town. One of these times my friend and I were on a road trip just for the sake of it. Or for

Daedalus and Perdix, Bill and Ted, Crabs and Buckets

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I began this week by writing about compost…and that, if you’re just breathing a sigh of relief, is still to come, probably next week.  Compost, however, has been preempted by word of a minor scuffle back in the northeast, of the type all too familiar in academic circles.  It’s

The Aftermath of Reading

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When does a poem become real?  When does it cease to be a scribble, fragment, scheme, or intention, and assert its own particular vision of completeness?  If it’s a poem when it’s printed in Ploughshares, it must have been a poem when it was still scrawled in a notebook. 

Why I Reread “Paper Lantern”

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Every Memorial Day my grandmother took flowers to the graves of people she had known, military or not. She was a southern transplant, with ancestors that fought on both sides of the Civil War, but she lived in my grandfather’s state, New Hampshire, so the graves she visited belonged

Good Poets You’ve (Probably) Never Read, Part I: Buckram and Burning Birds

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Everyone has them—the books that we loved that got only cursory critical attention, if any.  The friends who managed to get the books finally, finally into print, only to hear a few grains of sand shifting in the long silence as they drive to the liquor store to buy

Mood

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Mood: a predominant emotion; disposition; a conscious state of mind. Etymologically, “mood” at its root is anger, anger and its sometime sidekick, courage, though, the book cautions us, mood’s ultimate origin is unknown.  Because who can really say where a mood comes from?  Construction on the freeway wastes an