Isola di Rifiuti

Here’s a brief snippet out of a review by Shannon K. Winston of Some Alphabets up at Colorado Review : > Latta’s poems are simultaneously playful and cerebral, joyful and > contem...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2023/04/some-alphabets-review-at-colorado-review.html

Here’s a short interview about Some Alphabets (Agincourt Press, 2022) conducted by Ruth Park, a student at Colby College in Waterville, Maine: And three poems out of the book: “Cordial,”...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2023/02/a-short-interview.html

Pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Some Alphabets, just out in the Opuntia Books series of Agincourt Press . It is available to order here at SPD. The back cover copy rea...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2022/09/announcing-my-new-book-some-alphabets.html

A prescient snip out of Paula Fox’s excellent novel, The Widow’s Children (1976): > He no longer liked to read. The sight of a printed page filled him > with a faint but ...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-universal-screech.html

Out of yesterday’s tramp. Twenty acres of turnips gone unharvested, rotting in the earth: their local cloying stench unbuffeted by the breeze. A bald eagle, immature, strafing forty or so mall...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/12/stray-notes-walking.html

PATRICK O’BRIAN, 1914-2000 Reading, of late, with something akin to preternatural joy and astonishment, the “Yarn-Spinner” Patrick O’Brian. The epithet is Pynchon’s, out of Mason ...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/stray-notes-patrick-obrian-thomas.html

CY TWOMBLY, 1928-2011 Cy Twombly, out of David Sylvester’s Interviews with American Artists (2001): > . . . It’s a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense > ...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/stray-notes-cy-twombly-john-berger.html

Roy Fisher (Photograph by Jonathan Williams) Reading Roy Fisher’s entirely captivating (and seemingly effortless) prose. Collected in the Peter Robinson-edited An Easily Bewildered Child: ...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/roy-fishers-easily-bewildered-child.html

EZRA POUND, 1885-1972 Out, Saturday morning, under irregular sun, to what the county maps call Watkins Lake, a lake bisected (or pierced) by a narrow dirt road: locals call it Thorn Lake. C...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/pound-and-music-stray-notes.html

Robert Creeley, c. 1955 (Photograph by Jonathan Williams) Sundry gleanings out of the pages of The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley (2014), the oddly reassuring human rub of the “merely�...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/creeleys-letters_14.html

Robert Creeley, 1926-2005 (Photograph by Jonathan Williams) Prompted by Creeley’s ferocity in reacting to Hugh Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951)—see the “April 18th, 1951” l...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/stray-notes-robert-creeley-hugh-kenner.html

JANE FREILICHER, “JOHN ASHBERY,” C. 1954 Merely to gather a few things pulled out of readings (“join’d / In soft Assemblage”). All seemingly bucking the astringency of the preposs...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/stray-notes-jane-freilicher-robert.html

ALICE NEEL, “VIRGIL THOMSON,” 1971 Something to put under the “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” rubric. Out of Virgil Thomson’s The State of Music (1939): >    �...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/virgil-thomson-and-state-of-poetry.html

Robert Creeley in Buffalo, c. 1982 (Photograph by Jonathan Williams) Reading, in smallish batches, the Rod Smith, Peter Baker, and Kaplan Harris-edited The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/creeleys-letters.html

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, 1880-1918 Leafing through a bound volume of the quarterly The Symposium (wherein William Carlos Williams’s 1931 review “Excerpts from a Critical Sketch: The XXX C...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/11/ohara-apollinaire-and-telephone.html

PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER, “THE LAND OF COCKAIGNE,” C. 1567 Lazy morning. “Your lasy bones I pretende so to blisse, / That you shall haue small luste to prate any more.” Blisse meani...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/small-luste-to-prate.html

John Sloan, 1871–1951 (Photograph by Arnold Newman) Back across the rain-bothered stretches of Pennsylvania, across the cloud-tamped flats of Ohio, the fling of percept lulled by the wheel...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/back-john-sloan-nabokov-william-carlos.html

Max Jacob, 1876–1944 (Photograph by Carl Van Vechten) Spurious sense of repose occasioned by incipient departure. Points east, domani. So I go into a reverie of negligence and lassitude, m...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/max-jacob-william-carlos-williams.html

Juan Gris, 1887–1927 (Photograph by Man Ray) Rainy cold morning. Out yesterday into the 32º Fahrenheit sun-up at West Lake. High blue sky with a few sweeps of clouds. The ongoing tumult a...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/william-carlos-williams-juan-gris.html

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, 1883-1963 Chomping at the air, at nothing. Besieged by that nothing, its casual unpreparedness. Nevertheless, a sallying out, a “mere improvise” (see Shelley’...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/williamss-speech-rhythm.html

ALDO BUZZI, 1910–2009 Oh to be fleet and capacious and omnivorous like—and one pauses to random the brain’s pert inessential byways and furrows for some mythological beast not forthco...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/thoreau-williams-aldo-buzzi.html

Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1925-2006 (Photograph by Jonathan Williams) Out of a letter dated 21 June 1967 found in Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann, 1964-1969 (2014): > ....

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/ian-hamilton-finlay-novalis.html

Pierre Reverdy, 1889-1960 (Portrait by Pablo Picasso) Usual sleeplessness of four o’clock. Up to read “at” the Reverdy translations in the Mary Ann Caws-edited Pierre Reverdy (NYRB, 20...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/oharas-reverdy.html

ITALO CALVINO, 1923–1985 Rain at four a.m. A low pressure system elbowing its way east: sensed in the balmy air, fish-scented. Unexpected after a cold weekend of high blue sky and autumna...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/italo-calvino-thomas-de-quincey.html

Merrill Gilfillan (Photograph by John Sarsgard) Out of Merrill Gilfillan’s Red Mavis (Flood Editions, 2014): > BLUE RIDGE: STREAMS ARE ROARING >  >  Morning in the shade >  ...

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2014/10/merrill-gilfillans-red-mavis.html