Most Recent Photograph of That Guy That Plath Popped Out
(bottom right; circa 1962)

Sylvia Plath’s son died yesterday. That’s how it was reported, even by the BBC. The dead man’s name was Nicholas Hughes, not Plath, but in death we learn which parent really mattered. For the record, he was also the son of a poet far greater than Plath, a man named Ted Hughes.

Hughes has been snubbed and despised for most of my lifetime, on both sides of the Atlantic. The American response is typically simple-minded and moralistic: “He killed poor Sylvia!” The British scorn for Hughes is (also typically) bitchy and disingenuous. But the result has been a boycott of serious appreciation of his work throughout the English-speaking world, and so powerful in England that they’re willing to lose the services of the best man on their team rather than give Hughes his due, while cheering their cheesiest and most worthless literary lights, like the pitifully untalented W. H. Auden. (more…)

Robert Creeley: Great Poet or One-Eyed Interspecies Plagiarist?

Here are two pieces of twentieth-century verse. One has been called “…the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem” of the 1960s; the other is from a long-forgotten collection of comic newspaper verse. One was written in 1954, the other almost four decades earlier. (more…)

Man discovered by apes

When I think of the 1990s, it’s the Ice Man I remember. He was found in 1991, in an Austrian glacier melting from global warming. At first the authorities took him for a murder victim (it was Silence of the Lambs time). They hacked his body out of the slush with a jackhammer, eager for their CSI moment, then started to realize he didn’t fit the profile of a Hannibal Lecter scorecard. His shoes were made of bearskin and deerskin and stuffed with dry grass; his cloak was woven of grass; he carried a flint knife that looks like a folded, dented can lid tied to a stick with twine. It began to dawn on the investigators that this guy was old, (more…)

It is clear by now that Bruce Ivins did indeed send those anthrax spores. The most damning evidence, in the view of the bovine chorus, is the fact that he wrote poetry. A sample of the poetical works of the late Doctor Ivins has now made its way onto the internet. Let us consider it carefully—gloves and full NBC suit recommended but not required. (more…)

A year ago I wrote a poem, concerning nineties. I will translate it from my excellent Russian to my broken English as best, as I can.

The Nineties

I drunked “Rakia”

I have fucked Maria

I had my happiness accented

And commandant me “browning”

presented

Such were years nineties

Were populated by the serbs,

the mighties

Were truly wonderful those years!

Near Saraevo, amongst mountaineers

I was Iovan Tintor best friend

And Tintor wasn’t guy with happy end

He was a military chef and he got lost

So president have Tintor fired

from his post

That time I have expressed

by the reportages

With the ecstasies, excesses

and with rages

O, nineties those years!

Maria’s red moisty clitoris

And Serbian silent rivers

changing gears… (more…)