SELECTED ESSAYS
In the Company of Rattlesnakes >
Who can say whether it’s due to the sun and the flatness of the landscape or the melting tar on the road or the relative likeliness of a rattlesnake by the porch steps, but it seems to me that those who are born in the desert tend to look down far more than up or ahead. >>
Desert Visions >
I was born or given to the light, as the largely Hispanic townspeople would say, in the impoverished desert municipality of Barstow, California. >>
Chile: Pigs of Gold >
Misreading the invitation. Not Join us in Andacollo for the Festival of Cerdos de Oro, pigs of gold, but for the Festival of Cerros de Oro, hills of gold. This year’s topic: Poetry and Regionality. >>
Henry Dumas' Sweet Home >
Why you would go there? Because in some ways, Henry Dumas, that extraordinary writer and charismatic activist, never left. This is the same wooly landscape he rendered to its eyeteeth in the hilarious, awful, brilliant stories and poems… >>
Will Alexander's The Sri Lankan Loxodrome >
Forrest Gander reads and discusses Will Alexander's "The Sri Lankan Loxodrome" >>
Marianne Moore, October 1952 >
92 St. Y Poetry Center >>
Nymph Stick Insect: Observations on Poetry, Science and Creation >
With CD Wright, I co-edit a literary book press, Lost Roads Publishers. Lost Roads, because the map, as poet Jack Spicer reminds us, is not the territory. >>
The Future of the Past: the Carboniferous & Ecological Poetics >
In one of the beginnings, below the fluff and leaf-encrusted surface of a wide, shallow body of water, microscopic spores swirl with bat-winged algae. A cloudy soup of exertions and excretions, the sea drizzles its grit into rich mud. >>
The Phenomenal Oppen >
It is in his attitude, his attitude toward words
that George Oppen finds the ground for being and so
creates poetry that is, for me, a source for a richer and more
communal life. In "World, World—" he goes so far as to say, >>
The Strange Case of Thomas Traherne >
In 1967, a passerby yanked a large, leather-bound book of neatly handwritten pages from a burning rubbish heap in England. In 1982, it was authoritatively attributed to that wondrously original 17th century poet Thomas Traherne and identified as his last consuming project. >>
In Budapest: On Miklós Radnóti >
In November of 1944, a Jewish Hungarian poet known for mixing innovative and classical styles, was shot into a mass grave with his notebook of last poems in his coat pocket. >>