Overcaptivated

Download Langdon Hammer's lectures on modern poetry. Though a fairly standard, establishment take on the period (he teaches at Yale, afterall), his lectures on Crane and Stevens are wonderful and will fit snuggly between Johnny Cash and Lou Reed on your ipod.


If that makes you sleepy, take a moment and read Katy Henricksen's interview with Zach Condon of Beirut. End of the year thanks to Mr. H for introducing me to the music. The Flying Club Cup may be my favorite album of the year.

Finally, if you're going to buy yourself one more book this year, make it a copy of Heather McHugh's Broken English. I know it's 14 years old, but these essays are smart and soulful. This is language poetry. A must read:

"The place of poetry is nothing less than the place of love, for language; the place of shifting ground, for human song; the place of the made, for the moving. Like other loves it cannot be free of the terrible; it is barely dictable at times, certainly not predictable. It verges on (and toward, at last) the unsayable, even the unspeakable."