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 […]
LUCILLE CLIFTON shapeshifter poems by Lucille Clifton 1 the legend is whisperedin the women’s tenthow the moon when she risesfullfollows some men into themselvesand changes them therethe season is shortbut dreadful shapeshiftersthey wear strange handsthey walk through the housesat night their daughtersdo not know them 2 who is there to protect herfrom the hands of […]
Nothing to say except that this chestnut, among Vonnegut’s hit singles, is more relevant by the minute: HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut (1961) THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was […]
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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