I offer David Rivard’s new collection of poems Otherwise Elsewhere from Graywolf Press as part of a 6-step recovery program (yes, we poet-types are a bit too lazy for the usual twelve) on how to hazard wisdom in an age of the poetically glib: Use their words with impunity; hack them to deep rooted stumps that catch in the throat. Find a convincing swagger before breaking into a giddy song and dance number. If squeamish about the...

Derivative. This is the easy response to Kurt Vile’s musical canon, including his latest, Smoke Ring for my Halo. Yes, he sounds like an earlier Jagger at his most jaded or a beleaguered Dylan, at times. But this is a bad thing? Talk to me about originality, to steal from Yeats, and I’ll turn on you like a badger. Why wouldn’t we want a dozen more songs that even gesture towards the greatness of “Moonlight...

It’s been some thirteen years now since I landed my first poem in a major literary journal. I heard a securely established poet recently answer a question from an audience member at a reading that he had forgotten his first significant publication. I was irritated, for sure. But jealous? I even remember cashing the $50 check from The North American Review, as well as the other checks that followed soon after from Prairie Schooner and...

OK, so I’m a sucker for a pun, but I’m also a sucker for this Baltimore, Maryland duo.  Wye Oak consists of Andy Stack on drums and keyboards (he pulls this off live, as well) and Jenn Wasner as vocalist and guitarist. Their new album Civilian is a departure from the sudden blasts of raw energy to be found on The Knot (with the exception of “Holy Holy”), but their new, slicker sound showcases Wasner’s...

  6. Pete Dexter’s Deadwood. Page 144 of 365. Nothing about this makes sense.  Dexter’s Spooner was one of my favorite books of 2009; I laughed out loud like a giddy adolescent. And I love westerns. Perhaps, it was because I had jusr re-read Leslie Marmon Silko’s masterpiece Ceremony and was more interested in a song cycle I was working on related to that book. I think I’ll go back to this one, though, as I often...

1. Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas. Page 37 0f 188. A nice looking book of prose poems/short fiction from Featherproof with some genuinely inventive and seemingly hard-won language that plucks at the gut strings. The truth is it is the kind of book in many ways I wish I’d written. It prompted me to tinker with a couple of what I had considered cast-off...

“If there is no such thing as time, you’re already there…” So begins The People’s Key, the latest (some rumors suggest last, but Oberst has denied this, sort of) from the moniker Bright Eyes. The possible epigraph is part of a speech by a friend of Oberst’s who espouses creationist/futurist theories scattered throughout the recording. The esoteric material is a continuation of spoken word mysticism we heard on Casadaga, an...

My wife and I recently watched HBO’s bold airing of Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones and written for TV by McCarthy himself, the teleplay stars Jones as “White,” a suicidal Professor of Philosophy, and Samuel L. Jackson as “Black,” a self-professed ex-junky Christian.