Tuesday, September 15, 2009

What is Bruce Weigl reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Bruce Weigl, author of more than a dozen books of poetry, several translations, and the best-selling memoir The Circle of Hanh.

His poetry titles include The Monkey Wars (University of Georgia, 1985); The Song of Napalm (Grove, 1988); What Saves Us (Triquarterly, 1992); Sweet Lorain (Triquarterly, 1996); Archaeology of the Circle (Grove, 1999); After the Others (Triquarterly, 1999); The Unraveling Strangeness (Grove, 2002); Declension in the Village of Chung Luong (Ausable, 2006).

His entry begins:
What I’m reading lately has to do with the work I’ve been doing in preparation for teaching Homer’s The Odyssey, a poem I’d also like to co-translate someday. Barry Strauss’ The Trojan War provides the clearest and most inclusive history of the war that Homer based at least one of his epic works on, and he does it with a wonderfully lyrical regard for his writing so that it feels like you’re reading a great adventure story rather than a work of history. What’s particularly interesting to me as a teacher are the ways in which Homer deviated from what Strauss argues was the real history of Troy, evidence that the role of the author was far more important in these early texts than I had originally believed.

I’m also reading...[read on]
Read selected poems of Bruce Weigl.

Writers Read: Bruce Weigl.

--Marshal Zeringue