May 2, 2012
On Conceptual Poetry
No Conceptualist Poet has yet come up with a concept as mind-bogglingly difficult as mine: Create a poetry that exploits existing grammatical and syntactical paradigms (sometimes as deceptively simple […]
April 27, 2012
James Bond and the Insufficiency of the World
On her Majesty’s Secret Service is one of the best of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, in spite of the fact that he gets married at the end, which […]
April 23, 2012
The Two Unsurpassable Poems in the English Language
Every successful poem is unsurpassable in its own way. Even a brief rhyme, like— John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone. —cannot be improved upon, repeated, or replicated. It is a […]
April 2, 2012
The Enduring Appeal of Jules Verne
If all Verne had done was predict the future, he would excite my admiration, not my love. How perspicacious the man was! Really ahead of his time! And that’s where […]
March 18, 2012
The Unwritten Late-Life Poetry of John Keats as Adumbrated in a Posthumous Epistle
T. S. Eliot says somewhere Keats’s poetry hadn’t yet evolved to the point where it could express the philosophical mind we find in the Letters. Keats, at the time of […]
March 7, 2012
Notes on Capital-T Tragedy
1. Why it started with the Greeks and showed up again with the Elizabethans. What makes a tragedy tragic—as opposed to a story with a sad ending—is that the sufferer […]
February 25, 2012
Poetry, Prose, and Prosetry: Shakespeare’s Hybrid Vigor
Prose took over storytelling (both in narrative and dramatic form) beginning in the 17th century. The prose shift in full-scale narrative commences with Quijote, which is why critics have […]
February 23, 2012
And Another Thing:
My favorite word in the English language (at least for today) is and. I’ve realized it’s the basis of my metaphysics—many Gods and one Brahman—as well as of my literary […]
February 23, 2012
Matchup #1: O Rare Ben Jonson vs. A Little-Known 15th Century Welsh Poet
In any discussion of elegies for a lost child, Ben Jonson’s frequently comes up. You may know the one I’m talking about: Farewell, thou child of my right hand, […]
February 11, 2012
Reading List: Old-School Narrative Poems
We prefer our extended stories in prose now. That’s just the way it is. It’s not just American poetic culture that’s made this decision. It seems to be a common […]
February 5, 2012
Slits in the Cell Door
The senses are overrated. It’s natural we should rate their authority so highly. What else do we know? Still, a corrective is long overdue. The human retina can perceive […]
February 4, 2012
On Ruinability: “Momentary” by A. E. Stallings
How small an alteration do I have to make to destroy the effect of your poem? Naturally, the test alteration has to be something a lesser, or less judicious, poet […]