Book list: Meditations on change

I recently finished Mark Doty‘s School of the Arts, a wonderful book of poems by a poet who will soon be teaching at Rutgers. (Picture at right from Doty’s Web site, is of a reading in New York in 2006.)

The book is a meditation on change — on the movements of history, on aging, on death. It is a book awash in images of altered architecture, of finality, and full of unanswered questions:

Which is worse, decay or restoration
that turns the past to a model of itself,
out of scale, new materials gleaming?

he writes in the title poem, questioning not just gentrification and preservation efforts — though they are the nominal peg — but our own penchant for myth making, for sentimental revision.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet