Arts & Culture

Next week, I’m embarking on one of two little first-book tours, and I’ll be blogging about those tours here.

I teach developmental composition in the Westbank of New Orleans, over the bridge from my home. If you were to keep on driving out there, away from New Orleans, you would be in the area on the map that looks like it’s breaking apart into the sea.

A few years ago, the poet D.A. (Doug) Powell and I, in a fit of industry, embarked upon a project called The One Sentence Review.

Perhaps to be human is to forget. Perhaps every culture survives by forgetting. In America we have forgotten so many things that we are sometimes called a people without a memory.

I won’t go on at length about Lax’s fascinating biography or the wonders of his minimalism and documentary poetics, because I’ve come to know his work only recently and I don’t have a grasp on its range, but along with George Oppen, Anne Carson, and Ernesto Cardenal, he’s already up there as one of my favorite 20th century meditative writers

I’m about halfway through Martin Amis’s novel Money, relentless, repellent, ridiculous, exquisitely crafted Money, a 1980s period piece written as if it were destined to be a 1980s period piece.

Despite my best intentions some writing days, perhaps too many writing days, become other sorts of days.

I was talking about blogging with one of my undergraduate editors at Mandala Journal, and it seems that, as far as blogging goes, we may operate in parallel universes by virtue of the technology generations into which we were respectively born.

In most dictionaries, bonanza is defined first as an exceptionally large and rich mineral deposit, and second as either a great stroke of luck leading to material wealth, or something that is very rewarding or profitable.