A free weekend and nothing to do.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but here in the Provinces, far away from the twin capitols of New York and Los Angeles, our newspapers don’t print any of those thinking columnists we hear rumors of (we’re lucky if the TV guide is accurate); instead, we get people like Dave Ramsey and Mary Hunt (and the only slightly more intelligent Cal Thomas). These two—and I’m sure there are other like them—dish out weekly doses of...

While at the Austin International Poetry Festival last week, John Milkereit, one of the Open Mic readers at Kick Butt Coffee, read a poem so funny I asked permission to post it on this blog. The only part you are missing is his total deadpan delivery so picture it.

I have always said that I don’t want to go to a Writer’s Conference with poets only. But this was a Festival and therefore different.

In the last several years I’ve been writing a series of “review poems.” I think of them either as “meta-poems” or perhaps as “meta-reviews.” In either case, rather than being a dutiful poetic commentary on a particular work, they look to do a few things that seem (to me at least) to be more interesting. One is to parody the review form itself, particularly the conceit that a reviewer is doing anything more than giving his or...

Each day I attach less value to the intellect. Each day I realize more clearly that only away from it can the writer possess something of our past impressions, that is attain to something of himself and to the one subject matter of art. What the intellect gives us back under the name of the past is not it. In reality, as happens with the souls of the departed in certain popular legends, each hour of our lives, as soon as it is dead,...

Confessions of a broken poet

I realized today that I’ve forgotten to talk about myself on this blog; hell, sometimes I even forget to attach my little bio at the end of a post, which just further confuses things. I figured this would be the case when I first started blogging, but today I decided to talk not about Thomas Hardy or John Gardner, but about Ian McCaul (that’s me, in case I forget to put my bio at the end). In my world, it’s MFA season, and my...

Someone, who is often quoted but rarely identified, said that there’s nothing more boring than other people’s dreams (it sounds like something Dr. Johnson would say, but I don’t know that it’s him). This probably includes things like steroid dreams, opium dreams, some hallucinogen experiences etc. In re-reading my previous blog (“Performance Enhancing Drugs”) I realize that the quote is applicable. The piece is way too long,...

The great composer, musician, writer and philosopher John Cage was born on September 5, 1912 — and John Cage centennial events have been happening around the world throughout the year. The John Cage Trust has been presenting the John Cage: 2012 Centennial series of programs, and a calendar of events on the John Cage Trust’s website shows the astonishing number of Cage celebrations that are happening this year. What follows is a...