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On Raymond Queneau
A poet needs to have some sort of constraint – many constrain their voice aiming for consistency; others constrain their themes, grouping... Read more →
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On Poe
I was a historian before I was a poet. Or to put it better, I was trained as a historian even as I was a waiter, a teaching assistant, a union... Read more →
On the Classics
The first book I ever wrote I put in a drawer and forgot about it. I did the same with the second, third and fourth. I self-published the fifth... Read more →
On Niane
I had been to ‘Africa’ before I had ever set foot there. It was a distorted mirror of that reality though, an unspecified, hazy, refraction of... Read more →
On Lao Tzu
I am reminded of the fact that there is a way and then there is The Way. The Way is the path the master takes. I have seen master printers at work,... Read more →
On the Kalevala
There is a house in West Philadelphia around the corner from a deli down the street from a liquor store past a school near a frat across the road... Read more →
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On Linton Kwesi Johnson
We ate corn porridge that morning, sipping tea watching the clubbers stumble into the street. It was milky sweet, the sugar gathered like caramel in... Read more →
On Rex Ingamells
You know those moments that stick in your mind, that begin to take on another hue as if they were a film, the kind of blue that is thick and indigo,... Read more →
On Hegel
What is the building block of a book length poem? What was it for Gesar of Ling or Gilgamesh, Dante or Homer? This question is not the same as... Read more →
On Gilgamesh
I used to think that the dialectic that mattered was art and politics, mapping those common sense understandings onto superstructure and base, soft... Read more →
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