October 15, 2016
Bob Dylan Won the Nobel Prize [!/?]
Learning of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature this week, I found myself observing, as if from a great distance, the point that the Committee was making (oral and […]
October 14, 2016
“Ultimate Male Nightmares”: on Boxing Helena and Election 2016 (Part 1)
Recently, I had a conversation with an older male colleague who enlightened me on the “real” reason Boxing Helena is not the “awkward fairy tale” as Jennifer Lynch intended: […]
October 8, 2016
Order and Stability
I can’t help but notice the word “instability” getting used, in political writing, to refer to widespread and continued lawlessness, violence, rioting, and so on. A “stable” society is one […]
October 6, 2016
And She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea (Part 2)
Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. (Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.) —Gloria E. Anzaldúa Once we realized She could […]
October 4, 2016
Adventures in Trumpland
What would Lewis Carroll have made of Donald Trump? In an 1875 letter to The Spectator, Carroll (or, really, Charles Dodgson, the don behind the pseudonym) lamented the ways in which the […]
October 3, 2016
“You Want it Darker”: On Rosh Hashanah & New Beginnings
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name Vilified, crucified, in the human frame A million candles burning for the love that never came You want it darker We kill […]
September 29, 2016
Timeless Snakes
“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and […]
September 28, 2016
She Is That Thing from Another World (Part 1)
“Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers. The person who came up with […]
September 28, 2016
Donald the Ogre
W. H. Auden’s “August 1968” has been on my mind recently. The idea that a poet might compose an immediate response to a catastrophe (in this case, the Soviet invasion […]
September 21, 2016
The extreme whether continues: how to live and write in the Anthropocene?
Act I of Karen Malpede’s play Extreme Whether appears in the Fall 2016 issue of KROnline. How to live in the Anthropocene? We are the first to cross this boundary […]
September 9, 2016
How To
Who said—and I’m woefully paraphrasing—that each poem teaches you to read it in the reading of it? Or each poet teaches you to understand their personal language within the poems themselves? I […]
August 29, 2016
‘Is that real?’: an interview with Justin Sanders
A few weeks back, I wrote about the work of emerging writer Justin Sanders. Here, Sanders takes some time to answer questions about truth and fiction, higher education, influence, and Baltimore. I’ve […]