Another Poem to Love

I can't honestly say I've been boycotting BP stations since Deepwater Horizon first blew up, because I didn't often fill up there. There is a station close to where I live, but it's a pain to get in and out of, situated as it is on a very busy corner and with not much room … Continue reading On Boycotting BP filling stations

I didn't do one of these last week, and I haven't blogged much lately either. End of the semester always does that, even if it's a summer semester. Hopefully I'll get back to blogging now. So, as Stephen mentioned in a recent Daily Rumpus, we'll be doing a poetry version of the Rumpus Book Club. … Continue reading Poetic Lives Online

In the past, when I wrote about Stanley Fish over at Incertus, it was to blast him, usually over his (to my mind) ridiculous statements about atheism, and occasionally about his ideas on politics in the classroom. But here, he's making sense when he talks about the problems with the consumer view of higher education … Continue reading The cost of education, and a bit on student evaluations

One of the tabs currently open in my web browser is a Google map of the quickest driving route from Waveland, Mississippi to Missoula, Montana. Sometime on Monday, my daughter and her best friend will begin their great adventure, driving interstate highways and US routes and toll roads and who knows what else on their … Continue reading Adventure

I've mentioned Poets for Living Waters before, a number of times. It's a poetic response/action to the current and ongoing ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. They've run a couple of my poems written in response to the disaster, and I feel honored to be not only a part of the project, but to … Continue reading New Poems

I apparently missed this tweetmeme the first time it came around, but when I saw it yesterday, I knew I'd wind up writing about it, just because books have always, it seems, been an important part of my life. Important really undersells the effect--they've been integral to my life. I used to walk into walls … Continue reading #booksthatchangedmyworld

Check out this terrific interview with Amy King at Huffington Post on the current "Femininaissance" in poetry. Artifice Mag muses on summer reading and wants to know what you're reading this summer. Dante Michaux on "What's American about American Poetry?" Another year, different drama over the Oxford Poetry Professorship. Video from the Brooklyn action by … Continue reading Poetic Lives Online

Yesterday, someone (I think it might have been the Poetry Foundation, but I could be very wrong) tweeted this piece from Drexel University, and it made me sad, frankly. It's an advice column of sorts for poets. Here's the question(s): I think of poetry as a boys’ club. Do female poets have to learn to … Continue reading What exactly is a masculine style?

One of my Facebook friends "liked" this article from NBC Miami which mentions a naked bike ride to "protest BP." This brings together a number of things I approve of--public nudity, protesting an oil company, and bicycle riding. But I don't know how I feel about the combination of these things. This feels to me … Continue reading Naked Bicycling

Given the number of students I teach every semester, I'm surprised it hasn't happened before now;. I meet, after all, an average of 90 new students twice a year (not including summer classes), and I'm in my fifth year doing this just at FAU, so it would seem likely that, at some point, one of … Continue reading Losing a Student