Emma Lazarus was a fourth-generation New York Jew. At 17, she published her first book of poems, a volume admired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who entertained and flirted with her in Concord. She was a friend of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Henry James. She was also a feminist, activist, and secular Zionist before such terms […]
Donald Hall used to have his own zip code. So prodigious was his correspondence, it overwhelmed the Danbury, NH post office where his mail was delivered. Later, his mailing address switched to Wilmot, and he grudgingly obtained an email address for his assistant. But he still keeps a book of stamps beside his armchair, and […]
In the final section of his eagerly anticipated new book, Lloyd Schwartz writes, “The older I get, the less and less/I understand this world,//and the people in it.” (“To My Oldest Friend, Whose Silence Is Like a Death”). But throughout Little Kisses, it’s clear that Lloyd—a dear friend whose first name I’ll use throughout this […]
Copperfish Books is that small miracle, an independent bookstore in a city with a population not much bigger than my current hometown, and a lot smaller than Lexington, the neighboring Harvard/Tufts/high tech bedroom community where I lived for decades and which lost its three bookstores years ago. Copperfish sponsors literary events, and last week I […]
On the cover of Dan Albergotti’s Millenial Teeth, a child attacked by lightning bolts configured to look like a dragon staggers backwards (the figures come from a warning label on electrical equipment). Rarely has a book’s cover served so completely as a metaphor for what’s inside. Albergotti’s poems speak from a heart wounded by currents […]
The public life of poetry can be both a sword and a shield. It can bind listeners together while reaching individual members of an audience in deep, profound, and diverse ways. The Auden quote that “poetry makes nothing happen” removes the phrase from its context in the second section of Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. […]
Late last month at the Blacksmith House I heard Robert Pinsky read from his new book, At the Foundling Hospital. I was rapt. “Omnivorous reverence” is the phrase Tony Hoagland uses to describe Robert’s artistic scope and method. One of the poems Robert read that night is “Running with Noodles;” it begins with the delicious […]
When Doug Holder asked me for some background information for his interview program on Somerville Cable Access, “Poet to Poet,” I referred him to a Q&A I did with the online journal Niche, not realizing the link had been taken down. Among other questions, I discuss the source of “Italian Nobody,” a poem in Know […]