Imagine yourself wandering lost on the high plains of Nebraska and South Dakota with no companions and nothing but your wits to sustain you. Your only provisions are whatever you can kill or gather, and though you have a rifle to hunt game, you have no more than a few bullets. How long would you survive? What would you do to survive? Worse, what if the year were 1804, long before the advent of highways, gas stations, and nationwide cellular phone coverage?

My answers would probably be something along the lines of, “Not long”, “I have no idea”, and “What? No cell phone?”

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Tags: books & writing, living poetry by Les Kay
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The path to book publication for “young” poets typically involves entering at least one (more often many) first book contest. The oldest, and perhaps most prestigious, of these contests is the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which began in 1919. Since then, under the banner of the series, Yale University Press has had the opportunity to introduce the world to books such as Muriel Rukeyser’s Theories of Flight, W.S. Merwin’s A Mask for Janus, John Ashbery’s Some Trees, and Carolyn Forché’s Gathering the Tribes. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, living poetry by Les Kay
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My initial response to Rick Barot’s Want (aside from the inevitable “ooh” that comes from trailing one’s fingers across a volume from Sarabande Books) was to think, immediately, that he is an amazing poet. This is someone whose work I’m almost obliged to share with others. Indeed, the first three poems in this, his second collection, are currently jockeying (along with a 20-minute rendition of a Pink Floyd song) in my mind for inclusion in this review. All are damn fine poems, and I want to tell you about all of them. I want, as a critic, to tell you about most of the poems in this book, to gaze in as minute detail as is possible into the soundness of the lines and the vividness of the imagery. Alas, criticism, like any other form of writing, is a negotiation with such competing desires (and with those doubts that shadow them).

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Tags: books & writing, living poetry by Les Kay
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Perhaps no other contemporary poet is known more for his writing about poetry than William Logan. As a critic, Logan has been nothing if not divisive. His scathing reviews of almost every volume of verse subjected to his critical acuity have garnered him the sort of notoriety and name recognition that few poets could ever imagine. In fact, in 2002, an article in Slate reiterated the claim that Logan is the “most hated man in American poetry” — in the subtitle!

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Tags: books & writing, living poetry by Les Kay
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