XJK: I like the sound of words and the fun of putting them together. When I first made fumbling attempts to write, I tried writing fiction too. I wrote extensive imitations of Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys, but those projects didn’t get anyplace. Actually, later on I wrote some science fiction for pulp magazines, two fantasy novels for children, and some stories in little magazines.

Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008, by X. J. Kennedy. BOA Editions, 2007. $17.00pb. Reviewed By: David Mason Here it is, folks, almost free of charge-another taxonomical declaration! In our time there are precisely two kinds of poets: populists and snots. The populists believe that something generally referred to as “the world” is more important [...]

Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber Read: X. J. Kennedy’s “The Pacifier” It’s rare nowadays to find maxims and adages embedded in poems, though verses were once a common and accepted way of transmitting received wisdom. But X. J. Kennedy violates many contemporary norms and expectations in poems that wander the ill-defined territory between humorous and whimsical. [...]

In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2007 by X. J. Kennedy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Reviewed By: Catherine Tufariello I like poems where you don’t really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them. I like what Auden said once, that poetry is the clear expression of mixed [...]

Read: X. J. Kennedy and KidLit I first heard X. J. Kennedy read in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I was in a lecture hall at the local university, weary and dispirited from an overdose of “serious” poetry readings, and I glanced at the doorway, deliberating on whether or not I should make my escape to the [...]