Commentaries - November 2008

troubled sleep (PoemTalk #12)

Ezra Pound integrates - or, rather, doesn't quite integrate - a response to a stupid contemporary judicial ruling on censorship and a fragment from the Canticle of Simeon (Luke, 2:29-32) to make a powerful, comic (even schticky) satire on American culture of his time and perhaps of ours.

Webinar

Two nights ago Jessica Lowenthal and I taught a Dickinson “webinar.” With fifty people watching and participating from near- and far-flung locations, we discussed two poems,

In search of endangered languages

Bob Holman, about as passionate about poetic orality as anyone, is visiting Senegal, Gambia, and Mali for