This morning I woke up and in my e-mail was my Today in Literature daily update. And they quoted a poem by Billy Collins who, it turns out, is our current poet laureate. And I don't know so much what the quote was, but the name of the poem was "Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey" which I thought was a great name for a poem, with apologies to Wordsworth, who, were he still alive, would owe me an apology or two for the number of times I was subjected to his poem about Tintern Abbey. So anyway, I looked up this Billy Collins, and it turns out he writes poems like this and this and this one, which I think is my favorite. I have not been this excited about something someone does with words since I thought I was the first one ever to discover Hemingway in college (which, it turns out, I was not). And it is a cross between really good poetry like this and really bad poetry written by teenage girls with lots of castles and symbolism, which is why I won't even try to write poetry.
But speaking of poetry, Ananaia and I were doing just that last night, in the context of the war, and I read her this one by ani difranco and she e-mailed me this one by Amiri Baraka both in reaction to the attack on the World Trade Center.
