digital emunction

From John Wilkinson’s fan letter-cum-review of Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy,” a long poem first published in Chicago Review’s British Poetry Issue (53:1) and republished as a chapbook by Barque Press:

The present review seems to be the first of a poem I think the most remarkable poem in English published this century. Having seen the shell-shocked response of two very different audiences I am at a loss to account for the speechlessness unless we’ve been outdone in our jabber and feel abashed (I’m assuming there is some kind of operative ‘we’ about, I hope so). The poem is doing some work nonetheless. A passion for new British poetry was admitted to me more than a year after this poem had been detonated in their heads, by some graduate students on a major poetics program in the US. But given the absence of print or internet commentary, I feel compelled to write a fan letter rather than a critique, and to say a possible poetic future starts here — and if it doesn’t, I suppose I can go and grow vegetables.

60 Minutes is profiling Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante on Sunday night. The organization, which is run by the inestimable Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl, does medical work in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Mexico, Rwanda, and Boston. It was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s excellent book Mountains beyond Mountains.

If you haven’t heard about PIH before, be sure to check it out. The show airs at 7pm on CBS. After that you can go and give them some of your money here.

UPDATE [5/5]: Video of the segment is now available here.

Wonder what an actual commander-in-chief test might look like? Have a look at the piece I put together for the Perspective section of yesterday’s Chicago Tribune.

And here’s another piece (PDF) I helped put together for last weekend’s edition.

A very, very short interview I conducted with Charles Simic is in this month’s (i.e. April’s) Chicago Magazine. Check it out…

For more on Simic see here and here and here.

My friend Ben Calhoun did a nice NPR story on Jeremiah Wright this last weekend. Listen to it here.

Songs of Insurgency, a new book of short stories by my friend and colleague Spencer Dew, is now out with Vagabond Press. Some of Spencer’s stories are available online here and you can order the book via SPD or Amazon.