Author Archive

People Are Funny

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This is old news, but in 2005, the Poetry Foundation gave the poet Billy Collins something called the Mark Twain Poetry Award of $25,000, “recognizing a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry.”   The press release included these two sentences:  “Billy Collins has brought laughter back to a melancholy

Five for Eduardo C. Corral

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I first read Eduardo C. Corral’s poems in Poetry and was knocked out by them. I then found out that Carl Phillips had chosen Eduardo’s first book “Slow Lightning” as his inaugural choice as judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize (the first Latino poet to ever

Some Notes on Narcissism, The Line and Poets By Name

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A fiction writer once told me that she thought most American poetry was apolitical and self-centered. Here’s the poem she made up to go along with her feeling: I was looking out the window upon a field thinking about myself. The line breaks are mine. I can see her

Book People

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Apparently, E.L. Doctorow once taught a course that only had one book on the syllabus. The class read the one book and decided from there what the next book should be. If it was Jane Eyre, somebody might then suggest The Wide Sargasso Sea, which was a prequel and

Racetracks in America, For Example

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When I was writing Track Conditions, a memoir about my mostly drunken experience as a groom to Swale, the 1984 Kentucky Derby winner, a strange thing happened to my body—it went back to the way it looked during the time the book was written about. Through diet and exercise

Abrazos, Adrienne, and The Revolutionary Idea

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I’ve been thinking about my old friend and first teacher Adrienne Rich every day since she died on March 27th in Santa Cruz and I was thinking today of an old funny moment in the sun I had with her and her partner Michelle on their deck in 1997,