On why we need to revisit old myths to create new ones…

What a delight to have this conversation recently with Mitzi Rapkin on her stellar “First Draft” podcast. I hope you enjoy it half as much as I did… Be sure to check out the back catalog, too! George Saunders! Isabel Allende! Viet Thanh Nguyen! Diane Seuss!

I’ve been reading a lot of Vasko Popa, and thinking about the games of children…  Here’s the poem.

“A Stone,” which originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, is now up at Guesthouse.

Big thanks to 32 poems, for giving a home to these thoughts on the beauty of revision…

My thanks go out to John Miller, for delving so thoughtfully into my translation of the Popol Vuh, on his Great Books Podcast, courtesy of the National Review!

The Popol Vuh is one of the great indigenous myths of the Americas. It’s an astonishing story where the world is born of divine conversation, where creation is ongoing, where brothers go on an epic quest to reckon with death itself, where our ultimate purpose as human being is to recall with gratitude the names of those who made us, and where the climax of the story is the first day dawning, so that Time, as we know it can begin.

This translation project is something I have been working on for a solid decade now – my goal was to make a lucid version that really sings, the first verse translation in English – and thanks to Milkweed Editions, (and their new Seedbank Series), it is now a beautiful book that you can hold in your hand.

How Fetishizing ‘Craft’ Can Get in the Way of a Good Poem