Maybe not my finest example of supporting poetry and poets, but I bought On the Bus with Rosa Parks at Politics and Prose because it was on their remaindered books shelf. If you stop by there, the poetry selections available for between $5.99 and $7.99 are really spectacular.

Rita Dove is a great speaker, able to be simultaneously engaging and intellectually rigorous (the sort of intellectual rigor lacking when Simic and Wright recently shared another stage). She has never been a favorite poet, but she is, at her best, formally interesting (at her worst, she plays with forms for the sake of playing withe forms). I didn’t catch it, but someone in the audience asked about her strategy of making the first stanza of a poem she read into a villanelle. Just a reminder that I need to read more into the traditional forms, sonnets and the like. Can’t all be free verse, my friends, can it?

No one is going to call On the Bus with Rosa Parks her finest collection, but it’s a nice showcase of her strengths. She frequently writes from the perspective of ‘characters’ and while it’s easy to say that those characters are almost invariably black, they are also frequently different from her in every other way. Dove has great way of writing unflinchingly, but also compassionately about the struggles of men with visions and expectations of masculinity.

From Graduation, Grammar School

Joe
sees hi son
flicker. Although
the air is not a glass,
watches as he puts his lips to
the brim–then turns away, bored.
He is not mine, this son
who ripens, quiet
poison on a
shelf.

Mary Ruefle appeared at the Hill Center and was a very engaging presence in the conversation with the Post‘s Ron Charles.

She also signed my copy of Madness, Rack, and Honey – with a special little something on account of my name (which is ‘Honey,’ by the way).

Thursday, April 30, was the final, formal appearance of current Poet Laureate, Charles Wright, at the Library of Congress. Rather than do a lecture, there was a conversation between Wright and the fifteenth Poet Laureate (Wright is the twentieth), Charles Simic. Don Share, the editor of Poetry, moderated and asked the questions.

I used to be a great fan of Simic and while I don’t read as much anymore, his collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End, had an earth shattering effect on my sense of poetry. Wright is someone who I only learned to enjoy after I first heard him read at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Everyone on stage was charming and intelligent and witty, but there was too much charm and wit on display and not enough talk about poetry. I like Share, but I rather wish his more contemplative editorial predecessor, Christian Wiman, has been on stage.

I brought a copy of The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990 for Wright to sign. The later poems in there, taken from Zone Journals, struck me very forcibly as being reminiscent of Pound’s Cantos (everywhere, I am constantly reminded that I haven’t finished my systematic reading of it yet). Partly, it was the Whitman-esque form of the lines and stanzas, but also the deep influence of Italy on both men. But you could tell that Wright had once been in love with Pound and carried the Cantos with him in a backpack. During part of the conversation, Wright did mention the Cantos and Pound and their crazy genius. He clearly loved Pound very much. When I asked him about Pound, he said he wasn’t really thinking about that ‘crazy genius’ when he wrote Zone Journals. He had read the Cantos as a young man, but not since. Which is fair. Works like that are for a young man’s adoration and an older man’s guarded nostalgia.