At right, El Paso-based poet Bobby Byrd, co-editor of Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots & Graffiti from the US/Mexico Border.Byrd's blog is subtitled "It’s a good time to be a poet, I think, although the pay is shitty," and recently paid tribute to Keith Wilson (in poor health, at 80) and invited us to come to Placitas, New Mexico, for a tribute reading. "Welcome,"Byrd said in his talk this past Sunday, "as Jerome Rothenberg would say, to the Paradise of Poets. Welcome, as Gertrude Stein might say, to the continuous now of poetry. We are here today to honor poet Keith Wilson, and by our presence, the radiant beast of poetry survives."
Pondering further in his blog on the phrase he used from Rothenberg, "paradise of poets," Byrd writes about his connection to that generous poet about whom I've also written here a few times in recent months. Along the way, Byrd kindly mentions our recent PoemTalk show about the poem from which the generative phrase is taken.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
