Filed under: literature | Tags: AIDS, franz wright, medicine, poetry, rafael campo
Great article by James Parker in The Phoenix this week about local poets Rafael Campo and Franz Wright, who write about the body in sickness and in health. (Full disclosure: Campo is indeed a doctor, my own, in fact.)
Long before he was my PCP, Campo intrigued me with his devotion to forms, particularly the sonnet, and the way that he subverted the norms of the Shakespearean norm and wrote poems about AIDS and death.
Franz Wright, too, manages to reinvigorate his work through his struggles with hospital wards, Catholicism, and other matters of the heart.
Bravo to Parker and The Phoenix for giving space to poetry, a real commitment these days when all the media wants to talk about is politics, the economy, and celebrity gossip.
Filed under: literature | Tags: fire to fire, mark doty, national book award, poetry
Lyrical poet and all-around nice guy Mark Doty won the National Book Award for Poetry for his book of New and Collected Poems, Fire to Fire. The award was presented last night at a black-tie dinner in New York.
I say “nice guy” without guile because, in the several times that I’ve met Doty, he has been one of the most gracious and unassuming major writers I’ve met. I happened upon his poems more than a dozen years ago, when he was giving a small poetry reading at a Newbury Street art gallery. I was just beginning to take myself seriously as a writer then, and the epic scale of his work and its unapologetically gay content made an impression. Now, I often teach his poem “At the Gym”, from Source, as an example of the way that an everyday act like benchpressing can be layered with poetic meaning.
Whenever I hear Mark Doty’s name, I’m also saddened by the fact that Doty could have been a part of the English deparment faculty at B.C. Our loss.
Doty is a stunning poet, and, as he mentions in interviews, the National Book Award is especially sweet because it honors a collection of his life’s work.
