Today’s Big Loves guest is Rebecca Hazelton, author of Fair Copy, forthcoming from Ohio State Press as winner of the 2011 Charles B. Wheeler Prize. Marguerite Duras When I was fifteen, during a layover in a sprawling airport, I picked up a book that changed me forever, as hyperbolic as that sounds. Marguerite Duras’s The…
Category: Big Loves
Big Loves: Jennifer Perrine on Whitman and Dickinson
Today’s Big Loves Contributor is Jennifer Perrine, author of In The Human Zoo (University of Utah Press, 2011). My Love Is Large—My Love Contains Multitudes I’m sure I first encountered Walt Whitman in high school. Sure because I remember poring over “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” in a literature…
Big Loves: Tyrone Jaeger on Jesus’ Son
Today’s Big Loves guest is Tyrone Jaeger, Hendrix-Murphy Writer-in-Residence at Hendrix College. Tyrone Jaeger Pushes Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son A hitchhiker with druggy clairvoyance accepts a ride in the rain . . . an ER worker witnesses angels descending at the drive-in . . . A man taunts his girlfriend moments after her abortion ….
Big Loves: L.S. Klatt on John Berryman
Today’s Big Loves contributor is L.S. Klatt, author of Cloud of Ink (University of Iowa, 2011). On John Berryman I consider a song will be as humming-bird swift, down-light, missile-metal-hard, & strange as the world of anti-matter where they are wondering: does time run backward— which the poet thought was true; Scarlatti-supple; but can Henry…
Big Loves: Rader on Stevens
Today’s Big Loves guest is Dean Rader, winner of the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize for Works & Days (Truman State University Press, 2010). Wallace Stevens I still remember the first time I read Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on The Dump.” I was an undergraduate taking an advanced poetry workshop from a fairly recent Yale…
Big Loves: Larry Sawyer on Anne Sexton
Today’s Big Loves guest is Larry Sawyer, author of Unable to Fully California (Otoliths, 2010). Big Loves: Anne Sexton When I first came upon the lines “the virgin is a lovely number” I felt for the first time, more so than when I’d read Wallace Stevens or was deciphering Apollinaire’s “Bergère ô tour Eiffel le…
Big Loves: Lina Ramona Vitkauskas on Mina Loy
Today’s Big Loves contributor is Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, author of The Range of Your Amazing Nothing (Ravenna Press, 2010). Big Loves: Mina Loy In 1999, Larry Sawyer handed me a book with a cover photo of a handsome woman in profile wearing long, heavy-looking thermometers as earrings. Her eyes were closed—expression seemingly relaying that she…
Big Loves: Traci Brimhall on Pessoa
Today’s guest blogger is Memorious contributor Traci Brimhall, author of Our Lady of the Ruins (forthcoming from W.W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). My Big Imaginary Love Fernando Pessoa wrote very little as Fernando Pessoa. He wrote himself letters as his…
Big Loves: Cyrus Console on Michael Van Walleghen
This week’s guest blogger is Cyrus Console, author of Brief Under Water. A contemporary poet by profession, I know a number of short poems “by heart,” though not so many poems as popular songs, which themselves I can number on two hands. Fact is, none of us can rightly comprehend the rigor of the former…
Big Loves: Ada Limón on Sharon Olds
Today’s guest is Ada Limón, author of Sharks in the Rivers. You can visit also visit her blog. Getting Naked-er: Sharon Olds I fell in love with poetry the day I first read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” when I was fifteen years old. I had never seen or heard anything so beautiful, elegant, specific,…
MEMORIOUS: A JOURNAL OF NEW VERSE & FICTION 