Mischa Willett a commonplace book

I’m pleased to announce the publication of Grain: the journal of eclectic writing, which features my poem “Hard to Get.”  In due time, I’ll post the poem to this website, but for now, I’m proud to be in the fine company of the poets Alissa Gordaneer, Andrew Torry, and Laura Trunkey, all with amazing illustration from Cate Francis. This [...]

I’ve started this blog.   Really, it’s just a place to shoot my mouth off.  Go.

  As with nearly every other spot on the ever expanding tourist map, Versailles is a place no longer to be beheld, still less to be awed by, or disgusted by—depending on the strength go one’s constitution, and the romance attached to her sense of history—but a place to be captured, recorded, digitized, and filed: [...]

Near where the peasant girl is being raped, and in the same room as another attempt, there stands in the Villa Borghese, a stone David facing a Goliath we can’t see. In a city where the classical and Christian collide, bristle, fizz, and even combine, these galleries, and this sculpture stand out as strange for [...]

  We killed this Jesus, and shook him, and these keys fell out.   This poem was originally published in Inch: Tiny Poems number 4 edited by Ross White. (available http://inch.bullcitypress.com/)

A letter I sent to the Editor of Poetry Magazine in response to a review written by (the usually very good) D.H. Tracy, about what is probably my favorite poetry book of all time. Read it on their website here: Letter to the Editor by Mischa Willett.

In August, I gave a poetry reading at the Phinney Ridge Community Center whose advertisement was designed by my talented friend Mark Selander at Machines and Humans. Several people commented on the poster, so I thought I’d post it. Check out more of Mark’s work here: www.machinesandhumans.com

Graphic Designer Dave Richardson has made a project on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 using my reading from Poems for the People as the soundtrack. Check it out: Sonnet 73

I get it all the time: you know who you look like? Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who finally defeated Hannibal and his elephants to close the Punic trouble.    It doesn’t bother me, usually, but I do tire of hearing the history bit.  Hannibal and the elephants! As if I could forget! This poem [...]

My review of the new book Blake and the Bible, from Yale University Press is out in the new issue of Books and Culture and up on the website here: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2011/novdec/untothyself.html