Modern Americans

Nathan Austin unearthed an antique post of Kasey Mohammad’s on poetic competence recently, proving that yes, Virginia, people do read blog...

The Peaches and Bats 4 launch party in Portland on Thursday flexed poetry’s ancient muscle as an aide to Mnemosyne. Jesse Morse used sonne...

Thinking lately of the life-preserving traits of Joe Pachinko , mail room chief at the last office I worked in. Publisher of Lenore Kandel ,...

Great post on the SFMOMA blog about the 15-year-old subject in Robert Frank’s 1955 Elevator—Miami Beach photograph. Kerouac closed his in...

Brandon Brown , who teamed up with Alli Warren to give one of the best readings I’ve seen this year in Portland, has some great new poems i...

Managed to see read in a single week Eric Baus , Graham Foust , Crag Hill , Lauren Levin , Eileen Myles , Douglas Rothschild , and Jar...

Jeremy Prynne’s reading of “Cocaine” makes Wieners’s poem sound like the tradition it’s so anxious to get into. In Wieners’s reading , it’s...

Opening library books at random as a means of work avoidance pulls up little opals like this: “If we should laugh at and insult the memory o...

Thinking this weekend of Jessica Wing , who wore spidery shawls against the hot campus sun, covered “Groove Is in the Heart” outside the gro...

Lesley and I are on a lethal late-summer cocktail of U.K. comedies— Saxondale , Yes, Minister , The IT Crowd , Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace , ...

Got to see Andy Vogt’s installation in the back of Adobe Books earlier this month; I like how Eric Heiman connects it to San Francisco’s re...

Attractive run of readings in Portland this weekend, Thursday through Sunday, to round out an exceptionally active August. I’ll be at three...

“To draw an arrant fop from top to toe, Whose very looks at first clash shew him so; Give him a mean, proud garb, a dapper grace, A pert dul...

Not Poetry, Poetics, or Portland, but help me out people with a little Pepys. In his diary entry for 14 May 1660, he notes Dutch ladies of f...

Though I missed the chance to track her down and say so, Laura Moriarty rocked some seriously fashionable threads at the Verdi Club this we...

“And so much for Mr. Dryden; whose burial was the same as his life, variety and not of a piece: the quality and mob, farce and heroics: the ...