The online journal EuropeNow has published five poems by the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu that Sonia Alland and I have translated. They join two others that were published by Plume in 2021.

That feeling when a student you’ve bent over backwards for resorts to cheating on an assignment because—this is what you know he’ll say—he didn’t have time.

What I’m listening to while I grade:

It’s not really helping much!

I had very strange dreams last night, but the only thing I remember is that the word “stochastic” figured prominently in each of them. It’s the first time I remember the dreams of a single night having a sort of through-line.

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #148

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #147

Going through drawers I haven’t been in in a very long time, I found this, drawn by my friend Frank Simone, who died some years ago. It’s dated July 2006 on the back. I knew Frank from the open mic scene in Manhattan in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

If I believed in a god, I would ask that diety to save me from grading. Just for today. Or maybe this whole week.

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #146

Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, piece by piece, the jigsaw puzzle of this essay is finally nearing completion.

Teaching the sexual politics of Deaf Republic to students in Introduction to Literature–mostly second semester freshman–is a huge challenge!

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #145

Asymmetry: Wrote two paragraphs of what will be the concluding section of my essay. Now I need to prep for next week’s classes. Hopefully, time away from the piece will give my subconscious time and space to unravel into clarity the knot that’s got me stuck. How’s that for a mixed metaphor?

Symmetry: now that I’ve finished the novel I was reading, today’s task is to finish a first draft of the essay I’ve been working on.

Finished reading: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 📚

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #144

Just got my royalty statement from CavanKerry Press for 2022 for $3.84, which represents five copies sold of The Silence of Men. On the one hand, a paltry sum; on the other, when I consider that the book was published in 2006, a sign of longevity, and of the press' commitment, that moves me.

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #143

Out of curiosity, anyone on here tried Spoutible?

Even the parts of my first draft that I deleted, thinking them irrelevant, are finding their way back into this essay. Writing prose is such a strange recursive process; this rarely happens when I write poems. In a poem, when I take something out, it tends to stay out.

I’ve reached the point in the essay where I think what I’m saying is stupid obvious and I’m saying it in the most simplistic and reductive way. That usually turns out to be the point at which I learn what the essay is really about and realize I’m on to something.

A knot in prose represents a knot, logical and emotional, in the writer. Unraveling it usually means bringing feeling and thinking into sync within the syntax. So different from a knot in a line of poetry, where, often enough, fixing the music is all you need to do.

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #142

Sometimes patience is a writer’s most effective tool.

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #141