October 2010

I teach developmental composition in the Westbank of New Orleans, over the bridge from my home. If you were to keep on driving out there, away from New Orleans, you would be in the area on the map that looks like it’s breaking apart into the sea.

A few years ago, the poet D.A. (Doug) Powell and I, in a fit of industry, embarked upon a project called The One Sentence Review.

Perhaps to be human is to forget. Perhaps every culture survives by forgetting. In America we have forgotten so many things that we are sometimes called a people without a memory.

I won’t go on at length about Lax’s fascinating biography or the wonders of his minimalism and documentary poetics, because I’ve come to know his work only recently and I don’t have a grasp on its range, but along with George Oppen, Anne Carson, and Ernesto Cardenal, he’s already up there as one of my favorite 20th century meditative writers

I’m about halfway through Martin Amis’s novel Money, relentless, repellent, ridiculous, exquisitely crafted Money, a 1980s period piece written as if it were destined to be a 1980s period piece.