AUTUMN POOL by Bill Regan Today I want to feature the painting and photography of Bill Regan, whose photo-collage was on the cover of my first poetry collection, Without Paradise. Here’s Regan: On Painting: My work divides into two subject areas—my passion for the natural landscape and my deep ambivalence about what the human presence […]
Because it is painful to so many, because it is driven by unwarranted fear, because it is a festering sore at the psychic root of patriarchy, homophobia must not be allowed to hold sway unopposed. In response to California’s Proposition 8, I offer this poem. While I am certain it is not, in generally understood […]
In my first book of poems, Without Paradise, there is a suite, “Six Paintings by Matisse” dedicated to the Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda, a friend who passed away last year in London. An experiment in ekphrasis, the poems are not so much about the paintings as they are about what the paintings called forth […]
I want to write here about my participation in the 2nd Simmons International Chinese Poetry Festival, October 3-5, 2008 here in Boston. I was part of a panel on the process of translation with Michelle Yeh of UC Davis, perhaps the foremost translator of contemporary Chinese poetry, and Chinese poet Leung Ping Kwan. In attempting […]
What aristocratic writers take from nature gratis, the less privileged must pay for with their youth. Try and write a story about a young man — the son of a serf, a former grocer, choirboy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing priests’ hands, worshipping the ideas of others, and giving thanks […]
Verse Daily featured my poem “An Old Story” earlier this month. It appears in the current issue of Cimarron Review. Today’s Boston Sunday Globe pointed me to John Curran’s gathering of great diagrams from anthropology and other social sciences, to be found here. Among my favorites (and these really redirect the synapses, I’ll tell you!) […]
I have just returned from the best conference I have ever attended. Devoid of posturing and positioning and careerism, the thinkers who gathered at the How Class Works conference at SUNY Stonybrook were the very example of the free exchange of ideas, the generous give and take of researches, and the common struggle to articulate […]
It has been difficult to keep up this blog as I have wanted to; family illness, teaching responsibilities, other commitments have prevented me from posting more often. Today I’ll simply refer you to Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, where his selection for today, with his commentary, is my “Summer Job”: American Life in Poetry […]
The news from here is that my work is changing, moving from the personal and the politically topical to the perhaps more deeply political, satirical, even moral. But that sounds very foolish. I do not know whether the poems, which are a departure for me, are at all what I hope for them. They are […]
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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