I am going east for the summer. The suitcases are airing, boxes of writing supplies are full, the car has been tuned up. I still need to do one last load of laundry and pack. Last lunches with friends are fun, but I’m ready to take all my good intentions with me and make use…

  Leafing through a back issue of New Yorker, I found a hero! A writer who interrupted my meander toward the last cartoon. Ian McEwan’s story “Hand on the Shoulder” should not have had this effect, but it shows what even the most banal plot can become in the hands of a master. This piece…

  Erato is the muse of lyric poetry and she’s pitching a really ugly, jealous fit right now. Way out of scale, considering that it’s just little me ditching poetry for a time. As you might recall, I plan to devote this summer to writing fiction (actually rewriting fiction) and she’s taking my decision as…

As my writing friends know, I’m about to put the poems to bed for the summer and ease back into long fiction. For years I’ve had three novels sitting on the shelf and been avoiding them like guilty memories. Each one has a full draft, but not full enough. I’ve written in short forms for…

  Mean: shabby, of poor origin, hard to deal with. Or, excellent, skillful. Could go either way, but in the case of poems written by Thomas Lux, I mean the latter version of mean. He writes a mean poem. And sometimes he writes a dark and violent poem.”Quarrels with the world”–that’s what Lux called his…