Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . If you can't kill it, I guess you may as well call it Evergreen. Launched in 1957, with work by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, and James Purdy, Evergreen Review thrived for 16 years on scandalizing American propriety with audacious writing. Then it went silent for many years before it was revived on-line in 1998, and again in 2017. Now under the leadership of publisher John Oakes and Editor-in-Chief Dale Peck, the magazine has just published the first of four installments of its Fall issue, and is again kicking against the pricks. Headlining the issue is Guatemalan journalist José García Escobar's report on the immigrant caravan traveling from Honduras to the United States. Having embedded himself among the refugees, he was privy to their stories of hardship and to the moral ambiguities of covering them. Looking at the problem from the other end, the American side, Natascha Elena Uhlmann ar...

I've been trying to catch up with myself. Classes were over by June 10, but the very next week I taught my first summer poetry writing workshop for high school students, titled brashly The Complete Poet. It was/is open to students from my school and elsewhere, but as it turned out, only two students from my school signed up, both of whom had studied with me. Although the enrollment was tiny, I went ahead with the course. Better to get the ball rolling than to wait at the start line, to mix my metaphors. I'm so glad I did. We had a great time reading a poet a day, writing poems inspired by the poet, and workshopping the poems. First day, we read Kay Ryan's New and Selected called The Best of It . We discussed her use of nature for metaphor and commentary, and her spin on common idioms. Second day, we read Brian Turner's Here Bullet , about his experience fighting as an American soldier in the Iraq war. Here we focused on his use of Arabic as a way of understanding and mi...

Tara Bergin, a poet whom I admire greatly, mentions Steep Tea in her reading list for POETRY magazine's Editors' Blog: "Particularly striking about this book is the way that every poem has an epigraph; brief quotations chosen from a diverse set of sources. The impression is of a writer for whom reading represents a vital part of the creative process."

when the sun drops another view of fuji-san holding up the feet In PN Review 220, a celebration of Eavan Boland. Many tributes, from Sapphire, Mark Doty, Paula Meehan, Tara Bergin, Colm Tóibín, Yusef Kommunyakaa, and Sandra M. Gilbert, among others. I have a small piece that looks at Boland's sense of humor in "The Fire in Our Neighborhood."

Top Ten Books of 2013 10. Magritte at the MoMA, The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 9. From the open-air market in Nice, fresh figs, goat cheese, baguette 8. The young astrophysicist in the hotel shower 7. The Seven Samurai 6. Splash Bar closing. Any reference to dancing in my writing is in part a reference to the dance floor at Splash. 5. Your excitement inside Cité radieuse in Marseilles 4. After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude , I saw an old man walk by with his grandson 3. The Talipot Palm flowering for the first and last time before it dies 2. Massage oil  1. The garage mechanic in Tara Bergin’s This Is Yarrow  and his black hands—“everywhere they touch will be evidence of him.”

I can't praise highly enough this first book of poems by Tara Bergin. I'm into my second reading, and it's even more compelling than the first round. Favorites, familiar from PN Review or from New Poetries V , are here--"Looking at Lucy's Painting of the Thames," "Himalayan Balsam for a Soldier," "The Undertaker's Tale of the Notebook," "This Is Yarrow"--but now set in the company of poems that deepen and broaden their resonance. "Acting School" acknowledges the distance between art and life, but brilliantly concludes that "there is a sufficient amount of physical truth" in the former to approximate, and even vivify, the latter. That physical truth I find confirmed, again and again, in the musicality of the verse. It is not drinking water, but in drinking air, poetry comes close to life. The contradictions and tensions in married life are conveyed with nervous, even harrowing, energy. I love the po...

I have five poems in PN Review 205 . Also, in the issue, poems by Sinéad Morrissey, Tara Bergin, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, David C. Ward, Alex Wylie and others. Get a copy! Subscribe! I am particularly taken by Tara Bergin's poem "Looking at Lucy's Painting of the Thames at Low Tide Without Lucy Present." Its every move is a surprise, but all are united by the opinionated, offhand voice. The work of Simon Jarvis is new to me. His three short poems are sharp and evocative, especially the perfect "Colloquium." Of the reviews, I enjoy David C. Ward's take-down of William Logan's selected early poems Deception Island . Who but Logan would allow himself to be blurbed as "the most hated man in American poetry"? I agree with Sasha Dugdale's estimation of Tiina Aleman's translation of Doris Kareva (conscientious but ultimately unsuccessful), and has bought Luljeta Lleshanaku's Haywire on the strength of Dugdale's strong recommendatio...