Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Tag: poetry
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My April 2017 Reading
Books My leisure reading of books slowed down a bit in April, as I continued getting sucked into lots more longform than I had intended and, on a happier note, did a lot more reading for my dissertation (good news!!!). Here’s some of what I read last month for pleasure. Nonfiction I spent much of…
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My December 2016 Reading
Books As the year limped its way to a close, I tried to keep up my torrid reading pace. I slowed down considerably from my October/November frenzy, and spent a lot more of my free time reading and writing on dissertation related topics (hi, Objectivist poets!) but still managed to read a fair number of…
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My November 2016 Reading
Books My reading pace slowed a bit in November (the US elections and their sad aftermath have provided me with lots of avenues for distraction and worry), but I still managed to keep up my love affair with books, though I picked a fair amount of duds this month. The poetry and fiction were great,…
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Belle Waring
I can’t remember exactly when I first read Belle Waring’s poems. It probably would have been at least a decade ago, and I do remember that it was one of her poems about nursing, maybe even “It Was My First Nursing Job”. What I remember most was feeling that I had discovered a voice that…
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Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara
At the recommendation of my friend Spencer, I recently began reading the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone’s The Abruzzio Trilogy, beginning with his 1933 novel Fontamara. It is an extraordinary bit of social-realist inflected anti-fascist satire, and I found myself quickly devouring it and eager to begin the next book in the series. It’s a very short book,…
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On the Anniversary of George Oppen’s Death
31 years ago today, the poet George Oppen died in the Idylwood Convalescent Home (now the Idylwood Care Center) in Sunnyvale, California. He was 76 years old, and had been suffering from dementia (Alzheimer’s disease) for several years before his death. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about George or his wife…
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Essay on Lorine Niedecker for Edge Effects
A few weeks ago, I was invited to write a short essay for the Edge Effects blog. If you’re not already familiar with it, Edge Effects is an outstanding blog run by CHE [the Center for Culture, History, and Environment], a group that belongs to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, which I’ve been…
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Cesare Pavese
I just finished Geoffrey Brock’s translation of Cesare Pavese’s poetry: Disaffection: Complete Poems 1930-1950. It was outstanding. I think I had been vaguely aware of Pavese as a 20th century giant of Italian literature, but I had never read anything by or about him, apart from some long forgotten praise by Phil Levine, who was…
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The Objectivists: Carl Rakosi
I’ve spent the last two weeks getting serious about my dissertation. It’s been two years now since I successfully completed my prelim exams, and I have almost nothing to show for that time, dissertation-wise. It’s tremendously embarrassing, and even a little painful. By getting serious, I mean that I’ve been diving into the primary sources…
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How to Write a Letter to the Editor
I know I keep writing about Oppen and his letters, but I just can’t help it. Today I was typing up my notes from his mid-60s letters, and remembered a pretty tremendous letter he wrote to Lita Hornick, then the managing editor of Kulchur, in response to Kulchur‘s decision to print “Soirées,” a Felix Pollak poem…
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How To Write a “DARE” Letter
So there are “kids, don’t do drugs” lectures, and then there are “kids, don’t do drugs” lectures (like Tolstoy’s “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves”–an absolute classic). I grew up Mormon, which meant that the Word of Wisdom (Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants, a book of LDS scripture) formed the bedrock of my attitude…
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George Oppen
I will try to keep this post brief, and being brief, it will certainly fail to capture the depth and breadth of my admiration for George Oppen as a poet and a human being, but I feel the need to essay–to make an attempt. I’ve just finished, this evening, a thorough reading of Oppen’s Selected…
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#2b: Designing and Making Invitations, Part 2
This is second half of a two part post on making and designing invitations. While this post isn’t technically about invitations, it does involve design work and letter press printing, so I thought it would make a nice complement to yesterday’s post. Because Laurel and I are both poets, we decided that we wanted to…
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At Long Last…
I have an approved dissertation proposal! What’s its title, you ask? Get ready, because it’s really sexy. “Thinking with the things as they exist”: Ecocriticism and Objectivist Poetics. Yeah. A thrilling tour through what I’m calling an “Objectivist” poetics (the writing of George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams,…
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Lorine Was Our Matchmaker: A Love Story
A picture of the finished rings. The ring Laurel made for me is on the left, the rings I made for her are on the right.
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On Seeing the One Thing Clearly
I’ve spent much of the past week trying with increasing desperation to write a dissertation proposal. It’s been the academic task that I’ve been ostensibly working on for nearly 18 months now, since I passed my prelims in early fall 2010. I don’t know what it has been so difficult for me to do, or…
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Lorine Niedecker and the 99%
One my favorite poets ever was Lorine Niedecker, a remarkable woman who spent most of her life living and writing on Blackhawk Island on the Rock River, just outside of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. At her death, she left behind a little library (including her now infamous ‘Immortal Cupboard‘, which consisted of, among other things, her…
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Mark Nowak
So, among other things, I’m going to start on ongoing series of features on this blog, one of which will be posts about my favorite artists, called, appropriately enough, “My Favorite People Series.” This post is the first in what I hope will be a long line of posts about all kinds of people that I admire…
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The Last Thing To Go
I play basketball on Wednesday nights. Pick-up games, at a church building in Madison, five on five, really nice courts. So it’s on my mind today. I’ve played basketball ever since I was a kid. I’ve always been into sports, and have always liked playing them more than watching them. Commercials don’t help–I abhor them,…
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To be a Carer
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the medical profession, and more broadly, about health. I’m not certain why, particularly since I haven’t been ill lately, and we tend usually to think of health and healers only when our body is not well, when we are in pain, when health eludes us. So I…