Featured | RICHARD HOFFMAN

Posted by rhoff1949 on August 29, 2007 in Featured

My new book, Gold Star Road, is now available from Barrow Street Press (www.barrowstreet.org), from Amazon, or from Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org). Here are two poems from Gold Star Road, followed by links to others from the book that appear elsewhere on the web, and jacket blurbs from poets Molly Peacock, Linda McCarriston, Afaa Michael […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on August 24, 2007 in Featured

I have wanted for some time to bring the attention of my students and colleagues to the well-documented fact that powerful political forces use the wealth at their disposal to shape our aesthetics. The trouble is that when one begins to speak at a forum or in a classroom about this, especially when you say […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on August 23, 2007 in Featured

After the recent suicides of poets Sarah Hannah and Liam Rector, I post this poem, by Brazil’s Carlos Drummond de Andrade, with some urgency. And deep sadness. DON’T KILL YOURSELF Carlos Drummond de Andrade Carlos, keep calm, loveis what you’re seeing now:today a kiss, tomorrow no kiss,day after tomorrow’s Sundayand nobody knows what will happenMonday. […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on August 11, 2007 in Featured

A while back I bookmarked this essay by Kathy Lou Schultz, but when I returned to it the URL had expired. I have found it elsehwere, however, and feature it here. It seems to me to be an authentic and honest grappling with the intractable issue of class as it pertains to writing, writers, MFA […]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JAMES BALDWIN

Posted by rhoff1949 on August 2, 2007 in Featured

“Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on July 23, 2007 in Featured

Sometimes, as a teacher, I feel like one of those honeybees who come back to the hive and do a little funky dance that tells the rest of the clan where the nectar is. Lately, I have been browsing the Michigan Quarterly Review’s site where every issue since their first in 1962 has been archived. […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on July 22, 2007 in Featured

All depends on the skin. All depends on the skin you’re living in. All depends on the skin. Sekou Sundiata: 1948 — 2007 July 21, 2007 — NEW YORK Sekou Sundiata, a poet and performance artist whose work explored slavery, subjugation, and the tension between personal and national identity, especially as they inform the black […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on July 11, 2007 in Featured

Philip Booth, a Shy Poet Rooted in New England Life, Dead at 81 by Roja Heydarpour Philip Booth, a poet known for his explorations of existence and New England in an intense, sparse style, died on July 2 in Hanover, N.H. He was 81 and had split his time between Hanover and Castine, Me., for […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on July 4, 2007 in Featured

For a couple of years during my twenties I carried a certain book with me nearly everywhere I went: The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell. I have no idea how I came to have it (I am an inveterate browser and believer in the serendipity of bookstores, especially sprawling used bookstores, and even then I […]

Posted by rhoff1949 on June 16, 2007 in Featured

This poem, along with visual art by Lisa Sette, is the latest offering from Broadsided Press. (See links.) The Car Covenant O give us individual mobility and daily we will embrace death.Give us miles to the gallon and things made small by moving swiftly away.We will sacrifice certain teenagers to the oak tree. Make the […]