Earlier this week, I was invited to participate in a reading with Anne Barrows and Chana Bloch that acknowledged Kristalnacht. So, I dug out some translations I did back in the early 1990s of some lesser-known Paul Celan poems. Here... Continue reading

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So, today is my son Gavin's birthday--dude turns 2. Armistice Day seems like an apt holiday for celebrating entrance into the world. An acknowledgment of peace; a remembrance of violence. It's all there. Here's hoping my guy veers toward the... Continue reading

In his op-ed piece in the New York Times earlier this week, Nicholas Kristof admitted that he would likey a little poetry: Please, Mr. Obama! The prose needn’t be as dry as the Harvard Law Review. And we wouldn’t mind... Continue reading

The work being done by a new generation of Native American poets is among the most exciting in American poetry. One of my favorite recent collections is Heid Erdrich's National Monuments. Her poem "The Theft Outright" is a fantastic response... Continue reading

Earlier in the year, a student in my Contemporary American Poetry class asked me if there were any "great" contemporary American poems. I told her there were many great ones, including, for example, everything on her syllabus. Yeah, yeah, yeah,... Continue reading

No city in America is producing more good poetry right now than San Francisco. Its older generation of poets altered poetry's landscape, and its newer crop of writers, who seem to be winning every possible award, are shaping poetic terrain as well. New York might stake out a claim as the country's fiction center, but San Francisco has planted its flag as the poetry capital of the United States. Continue reading