Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name

Francisco Goldman is an unlikely Hades.

Other than the cartoonish arch of his black eyebrows and his swarthy overall appearance, he is more Pan than underworld overlord. He is quick to laugh and does so with abandon; he has an infectious appreciation for beauty and eccentricity, is prone to exuberance, flights of fancy.

Mr. Stein drops knowledge

Mr. Lorin Stein making a direct link between the decline of independent booksellers and the falling number of so-called “midlist” literary authors.

Paris Review interview with Anne Carson

We’re big Anne Carson fans around here, so I’d be remiss not to point out that she’s interviewed in the newest Paris Review.

This exchange, about a line from Carson’s poem “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions,” is both interesting–I love Carson’s description of the way the line came to her–and amusing:
INTERVIEWER
The other line, the one I persist in [...]

The National Humanities Medal, or, the New York Times misses a trick

Yesterday, the Times’s Arts Beat blog featured a post titled “Roth and Oates to receive National Humanities Medals.”
Which led me to ask: Where’s Hall?
Today, I learned, from an amazing photo on the National Journal Tumblr, that Hall was right there the whole time!
Poet Donald Hall, that is. Oh, and the Oates was Joyce Carol. Still, [...]

“Nothing genuine in a poem, or so I have learned the hard way, can be willed,” or, Charles Simic on sources of inspiration

Over at the New York Review of Books blog, Charles Simic has written a wandering, endearing post about where poets get their ideas, the way those ideas transform in the process of writing, and the “uncertain and often exasperating” work of writing a poem. The post is full of wonderful lines–the sort of aphoristic observations [...]