October 29, 2018
An Interview With Idra Novey
Idra Novey started her writing career as a poet, and she brings this lyrical sensibility to her two novels, the 2016 Ways to Disappear and her new book, out next […]
October 26, 2018
Re-Reading “Anne of Green Gables” as an Adult
In Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery explores how the style of the writing and the ideology of the characters form the atmosphere of a literary work. This focus on […]
October 17, 2018
W.D. Snodgrass’s “Heart’s Needle”
With their radically revealing autobiographical tone and their excavation of trauma, the poems in W.D. Snodgrass’s collection, Heart’s Needle, are undoubtedly confessional. What’s interesting about the poems is that this […]
October 10, 2018
William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson”
If Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s project in the Cantos and The Waste Land is, in Patersonian terms, to pull “the disparate together to clarify and compress,” then Williams’s project […]
October 4, 2018
Hume, Locke, Rawls, and the Roots of Social Justice
In this time so full of social justice questions, I decided to go back to a grad school textbook, Social Justice (edited by Mathew Clayton and Andrew Williams), to get a […]
September 28, 2018
Re-Reading Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood”
Narrated by disembodied exclamations, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood is, indeed, a “play for voices.” The play slowly reveals the image of a town through its layering of verbal snippets. […]
September 19, 2018
A Book to Help You Talk to Your Kids About Immigration
I went in search of books for children on immigration recently when deciding how to talk to my son about this topic. I found Cynthia DeFelice’s Under the Same Sky. […]
September 12, 2018
Re-Reading Edward Dorn’s Long Poem “Gunslinger”
Book I of Edward Dorn’s long poem, Gunslinger, explores a number of serious sociological and philosophical themes in a humorous manner. The comic tone allows the reader to absorb the […]
September 5, 2018
Derrida and Deconstruction Simplified
There is a lot of antipathy towards Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction both in and outside of academia. In the interest of furthering the dialogue, I add my most basic view […]
August 29, 2018
I’m Not a Robot; Remember Me
us The quest for the meaning of life may be the oldest and most infuriating of all time. I’m on that quest this week. To solve this age-old riddle once […]
August 24, 2018
A Coney Island of the Mind
I visited one of my favorite places recently, that strange and wonderful land at the southern tip of Brooklyn called Coney Island. Aside from inspiring one of my favorite poetry […]
August 14, 2018
Mastering the Art of Prewriting
I talk about prewriting with my students a lot but often forget to do it myself when I work. Prewriting sometimes falls away in a busy writing schedule but actually […]