Yesterday this article appeared on the UMSL Daily website. It contains a lot of nice words about me, and a piece of good news: I won a teaching award. I’m deeply honored by the award because of why I won it: my colleagues and my students wrote letters on my behalf. (Writing teachers have an advantage in such circumstances, because their students can write.)
I love to …
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If you haven’t seen Mary Szybist’s acceptance speech at the National Book Awards ceremony, do yourself a favor. It is everything that we would want from a poet, or from anyone, honored with a big award–humble, profound, passionate, genuine. Szybist’s book is stunning, and well-deserving of the honor. It is the kind of wrestling (with big ideas, and with no easy victory) that we want, …
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Last October, I had the great pleasure of visiting Kansas State University, where I sat in on the graduate poetry workshop, met with graduate student poets individually, and gave a reading. (I also slept in the renovated ranch house out on the Konza Prairie, where the night is brilliant and immense.) I was a student in that very workshop–taught by that very Elizabeth Dodd–in 1997. It was …
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Somehow, the world seems to have chugged along without incident in the year and a half since I last updated this blog. This isn’t the first blog I’ve let go to seed–the world is also managing in the absence of my pseudonymous commentary on the Pittsburgh Steelers–and I suspect that the internet is littered with abandoned blogs, relics of a time when their authors tended them carefully, the dates …
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Last year at this time, I made it my goal to produce four poems each month. They didn’t have to be good, but they did have to be complete–I had to see them through from start to some kind of finish. I made a folder on my computer for each month of the year, and in each I resolved to transcribe and revise four things …
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When I joined the faculty at UMSL, it seemed like an opportune time make a website–suddenly, instead of mere self-indulgence, an author site would support my writing and my program, building (I hope) the profile of both. Plus, I got a raise.
I want to make a note or two here about two creative-types who made this whole thing happen. First, Josh McCall, who …
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