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Justin Jamail
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You're very welcome! Ah - I am afraid the asterisks are the leftovers of a faulty formatting notion I had, which I'll try to clean up, rather than indications of additional material. Sorry for the confusion!
John Ashbery's Visit with High School Students [by Andrew McCarron]
[Guest Author Note: Scholar and poet Andrew McCarron has kindly shared with us this transcript of a delightful Q&A session between the late great John Ashbery [pictured left] and Andrew's high school students at Trinity School in Manhattan. It blows my mind to think of John walking into one's ...
Interview with Tony Towle [by Jess Matuozzi]
Posted Oct 26, 2018 at The Best American Poetry
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John Ashbery's Visit with High School Students [by Andrew McCarron]
Posted Oct 25, 2018 at The Best American Poetry
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On the Life and Poetry of William C. Mullen (1946-2017) [by Anthony Antonucci and Andrew McCarron]
[Guest Author Note: I asked Andrew McCarron and Anthony Antonucci to share the news of their project to write a literary biography of their friend and mentor the classicist and poet William Mullen. Their essay is below along with a reproduction of Mullen's Enchanted Rock, which was selected by John Hollander for inclusion in the 1998 edition of Best American Poets.] Think of this post as a press release. We are currently in the process of composing a short literary biography of the late classicist and poet Dr. William C. Mullen (1946-2017). Professor Mullen died last November, just two days shy of his seventy-first birthday. As the unofficial stewards of his literary legacy, we wish to share the insights that we have gleaned from our mentor’s life-in-letters and to demonstrate our gratitude for the compassion, companionship and exemplary model of the life of the heart and mind that he embodied for us. Bill spent the majority of his dynamic career teaching Global Classics at Bard College, a liberal arts campus in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he was a colleague and friend of the poets Robert Kelly, Joan Retallak, and the late John Ashbery. Unlike these celebrated authors, Bill built an international reputation as a scholar and a translator, rather than a poet. Harvard’s Gregory Nagy, for example, referred to Bill’s book Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton University Press, 1982) as the best book ever written on Pindar’s odes. In the margins of his works and days, when he was not pursuing his research, participating in conferences, and teaching his popular seminars, Bill wrote poetry. Although individual poems of his were published in The Best American Poetry series (1998) and elsewhere, he didn’t live to see his dream of an original book of his own verse in print. Twenty-four hours before he died alone in the graveyard behind the church rectory in the bucolic hamlet of Barrytown, New York, his home for a quarter century, Bill sent us a collection of thirty new poems. In this email he expressed pride in a series of poems he’d recently completed, though he also lamented the complex circumstances that inspired them. This exchange marked Bill’s final communication with the land of the living. The remarkable thing about someone’s poetry is that the spiritual fingerprint of that person is contained in their words long after he or she is gone. And perhaps those fingerprints are especially vivid for poets who write primarily for themselves, free from the constraining literary personae demanded by identification with any specific school of writing (e.g., Language Poetry, Beat Poetry, New York School Poetry, etc.), or by the suggestions of market-minded editors and publishers. Indeed, reading Bill’s poetry suggests that it’s in the private work of unpublished writers that we can more readily glimpse the unique role that poetry can play in how we go about making meaning out of our lives as we attempt to decide how to occupy the tent of night. Bill’s poems draw on the traditions... Continue reading
Posted Oct 25, 2018 at The Best American Poetry
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"The End of the Evening" by Kenneth Koch with Reflections by Katherine Koch [by Justin Jamail]
Posted Oct 24, 2018 at The Best American Poetry
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Young Charlie Manuel [by Dayn Perry]
[Guest Author Note: Professional sportswriter, Chicagoan and Mississippi native Dayn Perry creates exuberant and frequently ribald poetry which generally takes flight from baseball cards and other images of ballplayers. I could not rest easily without sharing these with more people. Dayn Perry's futile efforts can be found here, mainly.] Young Charlie Manuel packs his shotgun shells with loose-leaf tobacco. That way it just stings a little. Young Charlie Manuel once benched all of West Virginia ... Continue reading
Posted Oct 23, 2018 at The Best American Poetry
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Transaction Structures and Blurbs – Some Graphical Assessments for the Busy Executive [by Justin Jamail]
Posted Oct 22, 2018 at The Best American Poetry
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