Sometimes the notes are ferocious, Skirmishes against the author Raging along the borders of every page In tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, They seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - "Nonsense." "Please!"...Learn More

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all...Learn More

It is awkward for me and bewildering for him as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom, balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale, but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier than training him to sit obediently on one spot with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie. With pencil and paper I subtract my weight from our total to find out...Learn More

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all...Learn More