Yesterday I received the current issue of New Walk, a British literary journal that has published one of two recent essays I've written about William Blake. As I paged through the journal, I came across poet Paul Driver's translations of three Verlaine poems, which were lovely and made me stop and think about French poetry--which I rarely do. I've always found Baudelaire, Apollinaire, et al. distasteful, so these pieces were a welcome discovery. I think American writers would do well to check out what's going on in the British journals . . . lots of poets we've never heard of who are writing intelligent, intelligible, musical poems. And New Walk doesn't charge extra for overseas shipping.

Autumn House Press's Coal Hill Review chapbook contest closes on November 1. I don't ordinarily promote book contests; but all my interactions with Autumn House Press have been delightful, so perhaps yours will be as well.

I guess that's all the professional-sounding news I have to share today. In nonprofessional news, I'm still afraid of mousetraps and can't get the woodstove to light. In weather news, snow is forecast for Thursday night, and middle schoolers don't believe in the efficacy of winter coats. In reading news, I recommend the lais of Marie de France and a comic/horrifying Wikipedia article about the year Rome was inflicted with four emperors. I read it aloud to my son while he was washing dishes (his idea: both the dishes and the reading). The article ends with my current favorite deathbed quotation: "Vespasian did not meet any direct threat to his imperial power after the death of Vitellius. He became the founder of the stable Flavian dynasty that succeeded the Julio-Claudians and died of natural causes as emperor in 79, with the famous last words, 'Vae, puto deus fio' ('Dear me, I must be turning into a god')."