Ron Slate's blog

March 29th, 2010

Twenty-One Poets Recommend New and Recent Books of Poetry

For the third springtime, I’ve invited poets to tell us about their favorite new books of poetry. This year they picked titles by Richard Jackson, Ted Mathys, Hillel Halkin, Beth Bachmann, Dora Malech, Valzhyna Mort, D.A.

March 19th, 2010

on A Reader on Reading, essays by Alberto Manguel (Yale University Press)

Radim Kralik, the owner of Grapo Technologies, a Czech company producing wide format printers, lives in a 3,660-foot modernistic concrete box atop a converted grain silo in Olomouc, about 175 miles east of Prague.

March 7th, 2010

on Stone Lyre, poems by René Char, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson (Tupelo Press)

When René Char died in 1988 at the age of 80, President Jacques Chirac called him “the greatest French poet of the twentieth century.” The writer Françoise Giraud remarked that Chirac “would read poetry behind a copy of Playboy” presumably to preserve his reputation as a seducer, but it’s more likely that Chirac encouraged the anecdote.

March 3rd, 2010

on The Stranger Manual, poems by Catie Rosemurgy (Graywolf Press)

It’s been more than 30 years since I heard Bill Matthews remark at a reading that a poet must submit to confusion and fear – and not make poems as charms against them. As intended, his counsel stiffened my spine. Who could argue?

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