Pentecost, pine tops, monkish rain

Looking at this one today. The Fourth Hour of the Afternoon by Michael Chitwood, in Field, via Poetry Daily.
Reading this as an optimistic piece. As always, I’m a sucker for religious underpinnings, and here I particularly like the title (although the “fourth” hour is a bit off in terms of the Divine Office, which goes [...]

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critiquing and reviewing

Quick! What’s the difference? No-one need pretend they know.
Some answers at this discussion.
How’s this for a blood-curdling quote?
“.. with a review, you are taking your life in your hands by criticising what a poet has published as a finished product. Many poets have huge egos and will hold a bad review against you for the [...]

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Amateur web reviewers!

Not without its perils as an occupation, it would seem. I’m feinting and dodging around this one, am failing to take the plunge. Part of the problem is my life is so crazy busy I don’t have time to weigh risk-taking properly. And risk-taking this is, at the end of the day, I am finding [...]

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An old lady and a frog

I really enjoyed this one, Lauderdale by Laura Newbern in Poetry. I read as an expression of loneliness – extreme loneliness, even. Very pictorial, love the surreality of the grandmother sitting alone at dusk “in the light of the long pale pool” (cool sonics too) talking to a frog, the shades of her coiffured hair. [...]

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Milkweed spores, jellyfish, atoms and stars

Looking at this today, The Future by Campbell McGrath in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
I was initially much seduced by a string of very engaging bucolic images in this one, in particular, a forest where infant ferns grow shapely as serpents or violins and I thought
… if I could drift among the stars
as among a cloud [...]

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Grading system

How should I grade the poems I look at here? If this blog had more than one reader I could open the question up to competition, but as it is, I will just have to allow the question to percolate slowly in my brain, ever so slowly, over the next many many many days. We’ll [...]

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Going for this one

OK, I really like this. Asking for more by Sarah Manguso. Makes me think of Yvor Winters – clanging steel and rough-riding self-discipline even when it really hurts, but also with a grim funny edge to it. I hope to be nearly crucified is a line to die for, in my view, and so is [...]

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Starting slow

OK. We’re starting slow. With this one. By Teresa Svoboda over at Blackbird. Motion Makes Us Cough is the title. Way to go. Let the first one we randomly pick be one we can’t make head or tail of. The subject appears to be emotion. The images are grouped around electricity; gun-running and sausages. There’s [...]

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This blog’s name

A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste. – Whitney Balliet

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Why am I doing this?

To learn. There is something parasitic about it – leeching onto and off the work of others in order to organize and feed my grasp on my own – but I’ll try not to let that bother me.

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