As Contrary Blog’s resident Joycean, I’d been planning to be first out of the box today with a post about Bloomsday. Logging into Facebook, however, I found that no less than five of my 333 friends have already wished the world a “Happy Bloomsday.” This, I presume, triggered the following targeted ad in my Facebook account: [...]

I was telling someone that my current experimental treatment was like the experience of being in a car crash. It’s the only way I know how to describe it. Sometimes I think it’s not even the crash itself but the treatment I just had was like the moment right after collision and right before the [...]

In his critique of higher education — how it began in this country versus what it’s become — for last week’s New Yorker, Louis Menand makes clear a few unfortunate facts of college today. Namely, that too many people go, and that many of them aren’t ready to be there. Thus, it’s incumbent on their teachers [...]

As a lyric poet, I think a lot about the limits of silence.  And I try to keep a sense of humor about the problem of those who are stingy with speech.  This is a pantoum I wrote a couple summers ago in Auvillar,  about the irritation I felt with “Bubba,” the silent type.   [...]

According to a groundbreaking new study into the mysterious workings of the human mind, and reported by the New York Times, our species developed its well-honed capacity for reason and argument not to seek out truth, however nuanced or elusive it may be, but rather for a decidedly more selfish purpose: to win. Lest my [...]

It was a hot day so I opened the big doors and settled down for an undeserved siesta. When I woke, it seemed that all of nature had moved in. Ants covered the floor. A bird perched on the shelf. A lizard slithered toward the fireplace. And somehow a bee got inside my shirt. Now, [...]

When   When the low heavy sky hangs down like a cover, you’re in Auvillar Without your spouse.  Dante’s on his way.   Ladies of a certain age compete for the clothes line. Show off gleaming copper pots.   Tea and flan, wet wash.  Dante’ s not your concern.   Beatrice tends him, pats dry. [...]

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch. Wow. Some book. One reviewer admits to considering throwing it across the room. It’s a memoir, and the writing is uneven. But that fits the life it mirrors. Like the story out of which it grew, it’s About fathers and swimming and fucking and dead babies and drowning. Written [...]

If you love discovering new poets like I do, then surely you’re familiar with that rush of excitement that often comes with finding a new poet whose work you really enjoy. It’s often said that you don’t find the poem, the poem finds you. Fortunately, I’ve done the hard work and found a variety of [...]

Yesterday, the Summer Fiction Issue of the New Yorker arrived. I think I may have squealed. The table of contents listed the nonfiction of Jhumpa Lahiri and Aleksandar Hemon and Vladimir Nabokov; essays on “Starting Out,” or becoming a writer, by Jennifer Egan, Junot Diaz, Edward P. Jones, and Tea Obreht; and the fiction of [...]

It’s all vague dreamless nights. Nights when dreams are squashed by the intensity of sleep, a forced sleep brought on by pharmaceuticals and anxiety. Mostly, if they come, dreams haunt me before sleep befalls me — in the weird space between the closing of eyes and REM; and then there’s a long quiet nothing as [...]

Just back from leading the poetry workshop in Auvillar, France (“O Taste and See”) sponsored by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and it was so delicious that I am seriously considering doing it again (and again and…) Wrote my little heart out. I’m including here a lyric from a previous summer’s lusciousness. Blue [...]

The boredom. It’s the boredom of disease. I stare at the objects of my room to no end, until they hurt my eyes. Like I think my eyes may have grown sores on them and have broken and pussed or have broken and are bleeding. Like even closing my eyes hurts and so, hence, my [...]