Two Poems from A.R. Ammons’ Brink Road “. . . as for writing, why, it’s like walking, you aren’t working but you aren’t doing nothing:” –A.R. Ammons (“Summer Place”) The poem “Play” is another of A.R. Ammons’ gems, this one from his book Brink Road (1996), which follows his more famous book Garbage, written in […]
Blog Tour
Thanks to Ann E. Michael for inviting me to go on the Blog Tour. I’ve enjoyed the poems in Ann’s book Water-Rites every since I picked up a copy at AWP in Boston in 2013. That’s also where Ann and I met and began our correspondence. So here is the magical mystery tour of my […]
New Age Poetry and Play
These comments first appeared in Critical Flame, 13 May, 2013 The New Arcanaby John Amen and Daniel Y HarrisSoftcover, $14.95NYQ Books, 2013 The New Age poetry and play of this collaboration call to mind Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness, in which Young brings New York School surrealism into new relief. He talks of a […]
Longfellow’s Grief
Longfellow’s “The Cross of Snow” and Kasischke’s “Things That Have Changed Since You Died” By Zara Raab We want to read and write poems that speak to us in this time and place. That’s how they come alive. But there may be value in the very strangeness, the otherness of poems from other times and […]
Poems on the homeless: David Ferry’s “Dives”
[Note: “Dives” is reprinted below and is available on line in Google archives.] Among poems about the homeless and insane, “Dives” is not perhaps as powerful, dramatic, or moving as Donald Justice’s “In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn,” or even Ferry’s own poem “The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People,” […]