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 15, 2015
Writing In and Speaking Out
Earlier this month, in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the community unrest and outcry that followed in Baltimore, Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS), […]
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 30, 2015
Facing It
Today, though I stumble, as usual, I am “thinking through” my language–considering my word choices in a draft of a poem, in comments on student work, in conversations with other attendees on the steps […]
April 28, 2015
everywhere/everywhere/everywhere
I am in Baltimore and I have nothing to say. I have nothing to say because I am trying to listen. I am trying to listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates: Now, […]
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 24, 2015
a Chamber – to be Haunted –
“The only way to be honest is to be haunted,” says poet Joseph Lease, closing a panel exploring “Where Art & Activism Meet” on Saturday, April 11th, the final panel […]
April 3, 2015
Technical Difficulty
I’m excited to be blogging for The Kenyon Review, especially at the start of the much-anticipated and oft-maligned National Poetry Month. Personally, I love reading blog posts that serve as […]
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 […]
February 24, 2015
The Pitfalls of Counter-Terror Literary Analysis
In an interview on an Egyptian television program in 1982, two of the greatest postmodern Arab poets, Amal Dunqol and Abdel Rahman Al-Abnoudi, spoke about the purpose of their work. […]
February 9, 2015
No We Are More Decent Than That
Both David Biespiel’s recent piece, about Jihadis and postmodern poetry, and G.C. Waldrep’s reply to it are disappointing; the former far more so than the latter. Ironically Biespiel commits a […]
February 6, 2015
A Response to David Biespiel
[Note: This piece is a response to David Biespiel’s “Why Jihadists Love Postmodern Poetry,” posted on The Rumpus, February 3, 2015.] We are caught unawares by violence, no matter how […]