My Morning Reading, Summer Break Edition
Rebecca Lindenburg lost her husband, the poet Craig Arnold, in 2009 when he went hiking in Japan. Here she writes about Arnold and his work very eloquently. I read Arnold's Shells when it first came out (the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Series), and I liked it, but I haven't yet read Made Flesh. I think I might do that this summer.
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When I attended college as an undergraduate, my parents paid my tuition. My father asked that, in return, I treat college like a full-time job -- give it forty hours a week, and then whatever I did with the rest of the week's hours was my own business. I never formally accounted for those hours, but his request stuck with me ... and shaped my attitude towards school and studying. So I think it's unsurprising that I find this article from The Washington Post depressing, but I know its truth too well -- my own students would probably bring these survey results far lower than they currently are. Too many of them work full-time jobs while attending school full-time, and the results are disastrous.
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My good friend A.P. has poems up at Liturgical Credo. I read the first draft of "A Corinthian Responds to Paul" back in 2008, when I was pregnant (with the boy, who has been embracing the Terrible Threes with gusto lately) and we were taking Walcott's writing workshop at Stony Brook Southampton. It's good to see the final version in conversation with these other fine poems.
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My good friend A.P. has poems up at Liturgical Credo. I read the first draft of "A Corinthian Responds to Paul" back in 2008, when I was pregnant (with the boy, who has been embracing the Terrible Threes with gusto lately) and we were taking Walcott's writing workshop at Stony Brook Southampton. It's good to see the final version in conversation with these other fine poems.
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I just returned to NY from a whirlwind visit to Virginia. My house is a disaster, I haven't run since some time last week (Monday?) and I have a hundred little "to-do" items, catch-up errands and tasks, to complete before I'll feel really free from the fetters of the semester. But I'm fairly upbeat, despite the laundry and decluttering and emailing that awaits me. I sent out the fairy tale poem last week, in its first draft form, after realizing that the most I was going to do with the fairy tale over the summer was tweaking and editing, not revision. I don't feel like there are big, global problems with the narrative, just places where the language can be more fresh, or more musical, or both. So I'll continue to edit it -- but in the meantime, it can be out in the world, attempting to find its place in a journal or chapbook.
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