Listening to Braille
In her recent article in the New York Times Magazine, “Listening to Braille,” Rachel Aviv quotes a writing excerpt from a sixteen-year-old blind student whose literacy has developed through aural/oral means, without the benefit of braille. This single excerpt is meant to stand as damning evidence of the failure of oral-based literacy:
He looked in the [...]
Review: Frank Bidart's Watching the Spring Festival
Hype: The Next in Line reviewed
Hi kids. Sorry about the long hiatus. I was out of town, and then some longer writing projects needed my attention. Also, every time I came back to the blog and saw that word “deathless” hanging fire, I ran scared. Some omen.
Good news: The Next in Line, my book of poems, received a sympathetic and [...]
Hype: Diva Compex
Premature hype, but I noticed some other bloggers posting about this, so I’ll say it as well: I’ll be one of the contributors to a book of essays, forthcoming in 2009 from Univ. of Wisconsin Press, called Diva Complex.
Diva Complex: Gay Men on the Women Who Shaped Their Lives, an anthology edited by Michael Montlack, [...]
TONY review
Reading from The Next in Line
Yesterday (May 2) I participated in a discussion and reading on “new writing” at CUNY Graduate Center. Four young poets — Jenny Boully, Cecily Parks, Douglas A. Martin, and myself — read from our recent books (mine is still forthcoming) and then interviewed each other about our work.
I began by talking about Douglas A. Martin’s [...]
Bibliophilia
“A library is truly a status room,” an interior designer said in a stylish story in today’s L.A. Times about displaying books at home. I agree: books are soulful, charismatic objects; they represent possibility and openness.
Books may be charismatic (whether they are “soulful” depends, I suppose, on your definition of soul; I have none). But [...]
