There's a long tradition of poets annotating their own work: think of T. S. Eliot's notes on The Waste Land, or Amy Clampitt's notes on The Kingfisher. Joshua Mehigan, whose new book, Accepting the Disaster, I'll be reviewing in an upcoming issue, has just provided annotations for "The Cement Plant," one of his collection's many poems about work. Here is his explanation of the phrase "killed some of them":

As far as I know, there were surprisingly few accidental deaths at Blue Circle. One I remember was the result of an explosion when the kiln backfired and the doors blew off. Another occurred when a man fell into a screw conveyor. Of course the environment in the plant is not especially conducive to life, either, and it seems fairly certain that the plant causes plenty of less-obvious death and terminal disease. It might be useful for someone to perform a study comparing cement-plant employees with the general population for lung cancer, COPD, asthma, blood levels of numerous poisons, neurological function, life expectancy, etc. Death aside, men were of course maimed from time to time. Mostly they lost fingers, or maybe a hand. My father knew a guy who had his finger pulled off inside his glove when it got caught in a transport barge’s mooring rope! I knew an old belt operator who’d lost a few fingers on different occasions. More mundane injuries—such as dislocated shoulders, cuts, burns—occurred more often. As in many other factories, there was a large scoreboard in the shop that listed the number of days since the most recent “lost time” injury.

Rebecca Mead, whose My Life in Middlemarch Mollie Wilson O'Reilly recently reviewed in the magazine, has an interesting post on reading lists and the nature of "guilty pleasure" books:

We have become accustomed to hearing commercial novelists express frustration with the ways in which their books are taken less seriously than ones that are deemed literary: book reviewers don’t pay them enough attention, while publishers give their works safe, predictable cover treatments. In this debate, academic arguments that have been conducted for more than a generation, about the validity or otherwise of a literary canon, meet the marketplace. The debate has its merits, but less discussed has been the converse consequence of the popular-literary distinction: that literary works, especially those not written last year, are placed at the opposite pole to fun.

Tim Parks on whether reading Fifty Shades of Grey will lead you to try more difficult books:

What no one wants to accept—and no doubt there is an element of class prejudice at work here too—is that there are many ways to live a full, responsible, and even wise life that do not pass through reading literary fiction. And that consequently those of us who do pursue this habit, who feel that it enriches and illuminates us, are not in possession of an essential tool for self-realization or the key to protecting civilization from decadence and collapse. We are just a bunch of folks who for reasons of history and social conditioning have been blessed with a wonderful pursuit. Others may or may not be enticed toward it, but I seriously doubt if E.L. James is the first step toward Shakespeare. Better to start with Romeo and Juliet