Tell us what drew you, in your roundabout yet clearly adoring way, to Gogol - and to rewriting Gogol, after a fashion, in something like the language of Tolstoy?
"Years ago, when I was working on preparing my master’s thesis, I culled through the work I’d done and included in the first draft a number of poems I’d written that incorporated small bits of autobiographical material. Most of the time, in those very narrative poems, I had taken as a starting place something real and augmented it with a lot of not-real. And then, I asked my mother to read my thesis draft. This was, as you might imagine, a colossal mistake"...
"I seem to have written stories, novels and later, screenplays, in a kind of rhythm, moving from one into the next, sometimes interrupting a novel to write a story, each form somehow feeding and breaking ground for the next..."
"I am reminded of a quote from Sherlock Holmes: Country houses 'always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, ... that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside...'"
We're off to the beach - and you? Too, we hope. We'll be lingering a while - getting the sand out of the cracks, natch, and making our way to the bottom of that tub of lobsters. And the other one, of beer. Back June 7, with the next installment of Love By Drowning.
I came to believe that if whatever had failed between Steve [Orlen] and his father had taken a different turn, if he, too, could have been the good son - was there room for a second good son in that family script? - then he wouldn't have needed to fill himself up with something as poisonous as smoke, might have known he was loved when he needed to reach down inside for something to carry him forward, might have lived on...
We like the relaxed almost-everydayness of Michael Homolka's poems, which is one reason we've published him twice - running a batch of four poems two years back, and now two more, live today. Also, the first time I read "Vertigo," I thought of Frank O'Hara, and that's a very good thing...
National Poetry Month has come to a close and so has our Haiku Contest on Twitter. We received so many great tweets over the past two weeks that it was difficult to choose which lucky few to feature, but we managed to agree on a handful of favorites...
No Stendhal, she, but around here, poet Karen Rigby is known as the author of the "Red" and the "Black." And then there's her work for Cerise Press, about which...
