March 27, 2012
Namesakes: On Titles
A few weeks back, I was in Boston for a reading when a friend showed me the Amazon page for Jane Springer’s forthcoming book, Murder Ballad. My friend asked “Doesn’t […]
March 21, 2012
Craft Note: The Elegy (part one)
[Blogger’s note: This post is part of a series of craft notes that look forward to the work Tarfia Faizullah and I will be doing at the Kenyon Review Writers […]
March 14, 2012
Daylight Savings & The Movable Dawn: A Postscript on the Aubade
About as soon as I posted my dialogue with her on the aubade, Tarfia sent me a link to Kenyon Review Writers Workshop faculty member Carl Phillips’ own “Aubade: Some […]
March 11, 2012
Craft Note: The Aubade: Poem of Beginnings
This is the first in a series of craft notes, developed in a conversation between me and Tarfia Faizullah who will join me at the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop (seats […]
March 8, 2012
A Few Notes on Craft — and Games
I remember clearly though it’s more than fifteen years past a graduate-school colleague standing up in the apartment of a friend, several hours of workshop conversation behind us, and declaring […]
March 6, 2012
A Craft Note on The Craft Note
I spent this past weekend at the annual AWP Conference in Chicago, alternately overstimulated by the crowd in the bookfair and by the conversations in and around the panels. I […]
February 12, 2012
The Fact of a Poem
Earlier this week, while there were some interesting—and interestingly broad—reactions to the excerpts from the forthcoming/arriving book The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal printed in […]
February 4, 2012
Forests of Trees: More on the Book as a Form (for Poets)
In response to my last post, Miss Redd writes: Pre-creating a book of poems before the book of poems has been written seems like an elaborate and tricky solution to […]
January 24, 2012
Poems : Books :: Trees : Forests?
Mary McNamara, the LA Times television critic, ends a recent article about “The side effects of binge television”—that is, the increasingly popular trend of watching an episodic show for hours […]
January 14, 2012
Bookstore as Accidental Meeting House
This month, Black Ocean Books publisher Janaka Stucky argues (apropos of last month’s debate about Amazon’s promotion for customers who scan book barcodes in bookstores and compare prices) that “in […]
December 26, 2011
ON THE ANTHOLOGY
A few weeks back, when the arguments about Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry were cresting, another poet asked a group of friends, “Would you do it, […]
December 20, 2011
Wrapping Things Up
My first post on the Kenyon Review blog, earlier this year, was interested, via a Mark Irwin poem, in poems that begin with lines from other poems—in a kind of […]