el camino review

This essay is forthcoming as a broadsheet from Cross+Roads Press, and is based on an interview published on Basho’s Road in December, 2009. For me, poetry is language under compression. And there’s no more compressed form than the very short poem. Skillfully done, a tiny poem can speak volumes — it

I found out just last week that the poet Carl Thayler died last year. Thayler is a thorny, difficult poet, committed to the precision and beauty of carefully-chosen words. His poetry is dense, often allusive, and steeped in historical events and figures that many people now are not intimately famili