Voices
Paul Mariani, poet and biographer, is a former poetry editor at America and University Professor of English Emeritus at Boston College.
It should come as no secret that most readers of America don’t read the poems that appear in its pages. In fact, according to the uplifting annual or semi-annual surveys America’s editor in chief sends me, even the ads get more attention than the poems I send him. But then people read Am
Portfolio
What you look hard at looks back hard at you.
Culture
I’ve just finished reading Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem (Harcourt Brace, 352p, $23 hardcover; Harvest, $15 paperback) with its wonderfully subversive and liberating subtitle, And Fall in Love With Poetry, andtrue to its promiseI have just fallen in love with poetry all over again.
What the disciples had experienced on that first Pentecost I too was tasting just now.