Saddened to hear of the death of the poet Chana Bloch earlier this year, I have been rereading her poems, some of which I reviewed in Poet Lore (“Chana Bloch’s New World,” a review of Blood Honey). In remembrance of her and her poems, both original and translations, I am reposting an interview I did […]
Satire on the Menu
The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement By Diane Lockward Wind Publications, 2016 The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement begins with quotes from Byron (“The beginning of atonement is the sense of its necessity),” and, rather more unusually, from the Stanford Law Review (“. . . . carrots are often inefficient),” discussing the relative merits of incentives and […]
Dog Poems by Cleopatra Mathis
Cleopatra Mathis’s marvelous Book of Dog (Sarabande Books, 2012) really is a book of dog poems. The book has three parts: “Canis” [wild dogs], concerns the painful end of a marriage; the second, most interesting title section, itself a series of numbered poems, explores animal and dog consciousness; and “Essential Tremor,” the third, refers to […]
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 […]
Zen Poetry from a life of travel and Buddhist practice by Elaine Starkman
Hearing Beyond Sound: New and Collected Poems y Elaine M. Starkman Many of the poems in this collection draw on Starkman’s travels to Israel and Europe, and on her lifelong commitment to Zen practice. Fog is universal, but nowhere does it have quite the presence it has in the San Francisco Bay area, where Elaine Starkman, […]
A Writer’s San Francisco
I turned 60 this year, so my story will not be of interest to everyone! I began writing poems and stories when I was a girl and then at Mills College in the late 60’s. In the 80s and 90s, I was derailed from this path. THIS blog is my record of reclaiming my vocation […]