December 23, 2017
American Sonnets (Part IX: Concept and Impact)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part VIII: A Tale of Two Sonnets)”] In my last post, I returned to sonnets (traditional and conceptual) in Terrance Hayes’s first two books of poems, Muscular […]
December 22, 2017
Diversity First
Inspired by Caroline Hagood’s brilliant blog about erasure poetry and the seven words banned to the Centers for Disease Control (“Banned Words and Erasure Poetry”), I’ve come up with a […]
December 22, 2017
Banned Words and Erasure Poetry
Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, among many others, has called the Trump administration’s forbidding the CDC’s use of certain words and terms (transgender, diversity, fetus, vulnerable, entitlement, evidence-based, and science-based) Orwellian, in reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel […]
December 20, 2017
American Sonnets (Part VIII: A Tale of Two Sonnets)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part VII: Close-up On Coleman)”] The first published sonnet by Terrance Hayes I can find is in his debut collection Muscular Music, originally published by Tia Chucha […]
December 17, 2017
On Stones, New Eternities & Poetry
To our land, and it is a prize of war, the freedom to die from longing and burning and our land, in its bloodied night, is a jewel that glimmers […]
December 17, 2017
Forbidden Words and the CDC
Remember when the forbidden words were George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”? They were—and are!—fun to say, and they come trippingly off the tongue: shit, piss, […]
December 14, 2017
American Sonnets (Part VII: Close-up on Coleman)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part VI: Hayes In His Own Words)”] Wanda Coleman’s 100 American Sonnets span several collections of her poems, a series that reads as both a cohesive […]
December 12, 2017
Faith and Sexual Abuse
As it happened, I began this blog after attending Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It was a small gathering, and during the homily we discussed the church’s […]
December 11, 2017
A Condensed List of Things Men Have Said to Me in the Age of Trump
This past Friday, I run into an acquaintance at a grocery store. Earlier I’d woken up tired and aching; it seemed that my bronchitis had returned, or was not yet finished […]
December 7, 2017
American Sonnets (Part VI: Hayes In His Own Words)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part V: Hayes In His Own Words)”] Terrance Hayes’s conversation with Rachel Zucker, discussed in my previous post, is certainly not the only conversation in which […]
December 5, 2017
American Sonnets (Part V: Hayes in His Own Words)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part IV: As American As…)”] Hayes himself confirms some of the contextualizing ground I’ve covered in the past few posts in talking about his new American Sonnet […]
December 4, 2017
Better Things and Silenced Women
The second season of Better Things recently came to a close and, although it did so memorably with a multi-daughter dance performance, I want to focus on the distinctive second-to-last […]