. 5. Bohemia on the Mississippi

In later years: amid the bones of bohemia Once I began publishing poetry and some criticism in the 90s, I had hopes of finding the sort of bohemian literary community I had known a decade earlier when I had worked and rather starved in the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis for a number of years in [...]

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. 7c. Ruins on the Somme: a lost war poet rediscovered

Of the many thousands of times that I have drawn a dusty nondescript book from a poorly-lit shelf in a used-bookstore during the past forty years, only once can I claim to have pulled down and opened an entirely unknown classic of American literature.  Not that I recognized it as such at the time.  Nor even now, on the eve of its re-publication by [...]

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11. The river ran red: poetry wars

early skirmishes at Rockford College Almost from the beginning, poetry for me was a matter of contention.  The fight began before I had shown a poem to anyone.  I had read poetry seriously for several years in solitude, then thought to give my reading some structure and weight with a year or two of formal [...]

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