The Mind-Body Problem Reviewed in The Nation

POLLITT, POET: Only last year, longtime Nation favorite Katha Pollitt was stirring up the blogosphere with the personal essays she collected in Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories (now in paperback). Her new collection, The Mind-Body Problem (Random House), is a book of poems, and the two books would make for a provocative and satisfying boxed set.

Readers who revel in Pollitt's crisp humor, soundly made sentences and memorable comparisons will find plenty to savor in these poems, often as playful as they are moving. The landscape here is friendly ground: the intersecting lives of New York City, the peculiar habits of memory and the lively presence of literary and historical characters in the life of the mind.

While The Mind-Body Problem is steeped in compassion for the human condition, it's also a righteously graceful dossier on the misuses of power and the resulting waste of human spirit. Whether she's writing about the deadly days of Jane Austen heroines ("Talk about rural idiocy!") or channeling Job after that little incident with the boils ("People even said he looked taller / in his fine new robes: You see? / When one door closes, two doors open"), she asks us to ask ourselves, Just who's in charge here, anyway? Can we as vulnerable people--lovers, mothers, children, writers, citizens--speak truth and humor to power and make a stand worth recording? Pollitt's book answers with a triumphant and confident yes. EMILY GORDON

Poetry Club: An Interview With Katha Pollitt

Katha recently talked poetry with blogger Echidne of Snakes. Check it out here.

Pollitt Reviews "Byron in Love"

Here's an excerpt from Pollitt's Slate.com review of Byron in Love, a biography of the poet's love life, by Edna O'Brien. Read the full review here.

Not many writers furnish enough material for a biography focused entirely on their love lives. In his short life (1788-1824), George Gordon, Lord Byron, managed to cram in just about every sort of connection imaginable—unrequited pinings galore; affairs with aristocrats, actresses, servants, landladies, worshipful fans, and more in almost as many countries as appear on Don Giovanni's list; plus countless one-offs with prostitutes and purchased girls; a brief, disastrous marriage; and an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. And that's just the women! It's a wonder he found the time, considering everything else on his plate. He composed thousands of pages of dazzling poetry, traveled restlessly on the continent and in the Middle East, maintained complex relationships with friends and hangers-on, wrote letters and kept diaries and read books constantly, boxed and took fencing lessons and swam, drank (prodigiously), suffered bouts of depression and paranoia and physical ill-health, and, in his later years, joined in Italian and Greek liberation struggles. Just tending the menagerie that he liked to have about him—monkeys, parrots and macaws, dogs, a goat, a heron, even, while he was a student at Cambridge, a bear—would have driven a lesser man to distraction.

New Nation Column: "Can This Marriage Be Saved?"

"Caitlin Flanagan--professional antifeminist, author of a whole book of essays attacking working mothers, herself excepted--is probably the only person in the world who could make me feel sorrier for Governor Mark Sanford than I already do. "Watching the governor of South Carolina cry like a little girl," she kicks off her Time cover story on divorce, "made me wonder whether the real secret to a lasting marriage lies in limiting your means of escape." Trust Flanagan to use misogyny even when attacking a man. "Unfaithfully Yours" ("Infidelity is eroding our most sacred institution. How to make marriage matter again") adds nothing to the familiar conservative lament about the "decline" of marriage: divorce and single motherhood ruin kids; sexual irresponsibility, bad enough in the upper class, has destroyed "the underclass"; and why can't men (all her adulterers are men) stay faithfully married for fifty years, like her father? Flanagan is so moralistic and self-congratulatory--she's married, yay!--I felt tempted to hike the Appalachian Trail myself, and I've only been married for three years."

Read Pollitt's latest column in its entirety here.

Katha Pollitt: "The de facto poet laureate of Brooklyn"

Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn published an enthusiastic review of Katha's reading at Brooklyn's Bookcourt:

"A reading by Katha Pollitt is an enjoyable exercise in lateral thinking. Her poems are at once fiercely intellectual but also personal and highly accessible. They convey a a wide swath of knowledge about literature, politics and religion but are also full of sensory images that pop in the mind. As the owner of Bookcourt said in his introduction, "Pollitt's poems are subversive modern parables that are profound and accessible; they put her in the first rank of modern American poets."

Read the full review here.

Don't miss Katha's final NYC reading on Thursday, July 16th at the UWS Barnes and Noble, 2289 Broadway @ 82nd St., 7pm.

"Katha Pollitt's Poetry Examines Life’s Small Moments"

Robert Cremins of the Houston Chronicle just wrote an excellent review of The Mind-Body Problem:

"Whether she is re-imagining the lost city of Atlantis or refocusing familiar stories from the Bible, Pollitt’s constant concern is to examine the prosaic underpinnings of life, the “small daily moments / of beauty, renewal, calm” that sustain us when “we’ve lost our moment of grandeur” or grown “tired of transcendence.” She observes that while “in theory” we long for lives that are “hard and pure, like marble statues,” most of us are most of the time “content to be at home in this crumbling / city of appearances and salsa.” In Visitors, the dead return not to haunt or denounce us, "but just to take pleasure in everyday life.' "

Read the full review here.

Katha Pollitt Responds to Marth Nussbaum on Gay Marriage:

Read "A Right to Marry," from Dissent Magazine.

Why People Should Read Poetry, and Why They Don't

Read Pollitt's article from Wowowow.com, "Poetry: Not Dead Yet."