May 21, 2015
Doubling Down on the Clown (Part Two)
Here’s a holiday (of sorts) that I’d never heard of until this afternoon: Red Nose Day. It’s today! May 21! Or really tonight, from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. (EST) on […]
May 12, 2015
Coming In: Edward Lear
Edward Lear blasted his way into the world on this date in 1812. He was born in Holloway, near Highgate, just before midnight. The twentieth of twenty-one children, the young […]
April 30, 2015
Hitler. Toklas.
Hitler took his last foul breath on this date, seventy years ago. He doubled down on his leave-taking: cyanide capsule, bullet. I think we can all agree he was a […]
April 26, 2015
No Strings
James Spader is profiled in today’s Times. He plays the robot villain in Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron—but for me he’ll always be Graham Dalton, the all-too-human center of […]
April 8, 2015
Trophies
In The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry, Rick Barot, one of the book’s contributors, offers this bit of testimony about his development as a writer: For years, what I cared about […]
March 31, 2015
Whitman’s Obituary, Slightly Annotated
I spent part of last week thinking about Whitman’s final days: his misreported final day and his actual final day. In the course of this thinking (and thinking may just […]
March 26, 2015
Whitman Dies, as My Daughter Would Say, “For Real Life”
“I know I am deathless,” Whitman wrote, in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. “I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, I know […]
March 25, 2015
Walt Whitman, Run Down by a Train!
A few days ago, bouncing around in the Walt Whitman Archive, I happened upon a gem of an essay: “Walt Whitman’s ‘Lively Corpse’ in 1871: The American Press on the […]
February 28, 2015
Citizen Alert
It feels as if everyone who’s teaching a poetry class this semester is teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. (I’m sure it’s being taught in nonfiction courses, as well; it’s been nominated […]
February 27, 2015
Natalie Diaz, Taking Over the Game
About a thousand years ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, I took several classes with the poet Ronald Wallace. In one of the workshops, we […]
February 23, 2015
Rotten, Rotten, Rotten
We’re seven weeks into the winter semester—and my students have written some terrible poems. It’s OK; I’ve asked them to. We’ve been reading W. D. Snodgrass’s De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems […]
January 25, 2015
Let’s Play Two!
The recent death of Ernie Banks, at age 83, got me thinking about life spans: what we hope for, what we’ll accept. Banks lived a famously full life: he was […]