That last line, in particular. Congratulations on the publication!

His final lines really fascinate me. They’re wry; other times, mysterious. Never opaque. But even as he “completes” the poem, the irony pushes back against the very idea of completion. He must end the lyric. He mistrusts ending anything.

Truly, poem after poem, the best. Adventurous. Funny as hell. Raw yet such beautiful music. If he’s considered a regionalist, in a way to contain or diminish, then the critic’s attitude is provincial, not the poems.

And I like readings of a poem that are unafraid to be inconclusive, ending with a gesture to keep thinking and feeling with a lyric.

I like that one old etymology of “understand”: “to stand in the midst of.”

Not a critique of him. But I’m also fascinated by different endings—fascinated by poems that open rather than close. You don’t sense the boundary. You have to reread the same poem after the final lines, which create a new poem. Each time, a new poem.

Also, traditional forms and free verse are interdependent, a tension that gives each meaning, music, and legibility in our culture. I think some of the most interesting poems enact this tension, working in multiple registers and traditions.

Rather than vivid depictions of beauty and the internal life, River depicts obsolescence.

The poems are light, lean at times, unencumbered by overwrought syntax. The Branch Will Not Break is epiphanic—you can feel the poems open. But in River, it’s almost like a single undifferentiated bleak poem that never transforms.