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This is Part 5 (of 5) of my essay, “Hemingway Among the Modernists,” which was originally a lecture I gave at the request of the Hemingway Foundation on July 21, 2012. Here is the question that obsessed Hemingway over the long arc of his novels and stories: What can heroism mean in an age where it […]
This is Part 4 (of 5) of my essay, “Hemingway Among the Modernists,” which was originally a lecture I gave at the request of the Hemingway Foundation on July 21, 2012. We have been talking about how Hemingway the young writer absorbed the writing techniques of Modernism in his Paris years, and made them his own […]
This is Part 3 (of 5) of my essay, “Hemingway Among the Modernists,” which was originally a lecture I gave at the request of the Hemingway Foundation on July 21, 2012. The case for placing Hemingway, in his formative years, among the early Modernists does not lie primarily in the poetry he published. Through the offices […]
This is Part 2 (of 5) of my essay, “Hemingway Among the Modernists,” which was originally a lecture I gave at the request of the Hemingway Foundation on July 21, 2012. Modernism in the opening decades of the 20th century did not have the crisp outlines of the literary movement we see today. Maybe no literary […]
This is Part 1 (of 5) of my essay, “Hemingway Among the Modernists,” which was originally a lecture I gave at the request of the Hemingway Foundation on July 21, 2012.
I’m pleased to offer a glimpse inside my new ebook, Iron’s Keeping, which tells the story — in poems — of my experience as a former U.S. Naval officer serving in Vietnam. It’s free to download for my newsletter subscribers. The ebook contains 13 poems first published, beautifully, in a private letterpress edition by Carol Blinn at Warwick Press […]
John Barr was named to the long list of candidates identified as potential recipients of the 2024 PEN/Voelcker Award for a Poetry Collection. John Barr was cited for The Boxer of Quirinal, published by Red Hen Press. The award is designated for a poet “whose distinguished collection of poetry represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.” “I’m overjoyed […]
At the outset of my remarks I said that I would look more broadly at the subject of poetry and responsibility. For me, that starts with the question of poetry and personal responsibility, then moves to poetry and civic, or public, responsibility.
When we think of poets and their public speech today, we are likely to think of poetry as protest.
What a moment it is, to find a poet whose work is unlike any other, and is so good that we pray the poetry gods will keep her safe and warm and grant her a long life of writing such poems for us. For me that moment was when I read her poems in Poetry magazine years ago.
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Between Them a Universe explores two kinds of relationships we can have as human beings. In the first section, my poems explore the universe of relationships we can have with each other. The poems in the second section explore the universe of our relationships with the world of the non-human.