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 […]
I want to bring your attention to a forgotten poet of the Left, Lola Ridge, and to the fine book that made me aware of her work. Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge edited by Daniel Tobin. I have posted Tobin’s fine introduction, which places Ridge in the literary and political context […]
I am once again, after many years, reading Kenneth Rexroth. I should say I am going back to school to Kenneth Rexroth. Although I am aware that Copper Canyon just brought out a beautiful edition of The Complete Poems edited by Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow, I am content with my two New Directions books, […]
Ol’ Granpappy Montaigne I have just come from the second NonfictioNow Conference at the University of Iowa where I have met some wonderful writers, heard about some others, and renewed myself by recalling, from deep in a demanding semester of teaching, what it is that draws me to nonfiction, specifically to the essay. It was […]
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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