July 11, 2018
Goth Tendencies, Cy Twombly, and Turnstile Hearts: a conversation with Dean Rader and Melissa Stein
Recently Melissa Stein and Dean Rader, two San Francisco Copper Canyon poets, chatted at length about short poems, oxymorons, killing their darlings, lyrical gears, and inner/outer worlds on the occasion […]
June 26, 2018
Scaffolding
[Continued from “Pros[onn]e[t]”] * Where the title of Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Crawlspace, published by Bloof Books in 2017, pointed the reader toward the collections’s subversive sonnet form as an enactment of both interiority […]
June 18, 2018
What is it About Some Writing that Makes Us Gasp?
What is that sharp inhale, then heart flutter, then shot of warmth, then some kind of quiet in me when I read genius writing, that high I stalk again and […]
June 15, 2018
Pros[onn]e[t]
[Continued from “Crawlspace”] * Thinking about contemporary sonnets, shadow sonnets, American Sonnets, and so on and so[nnet] on, I’m fascinated both by the poems themselves and by what the poems […]
June 5, 2018
Crawlspace
[Continued from Age of Glass] * Face me in your sonnets so I can permanently grieve is really what the roses say to the antebellum purling dog tags of myself. […]
May 28, 2018
Age of Glass
[Continued from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin] Oh, the delight, when, after thinking about American sonnets for some weeks here at the Kenyon Review blog, the Cleveland […]
May 3, 2018
“It’s sexy, filthy, viscous, vicious. It’s religious. It’s archaic”–an interview with Montreux Rotholtz
A mélange of language by turns surreal and objective, with narrative poems intertwined with those more driven by sonics and music, Unmark is Montreux Rotholtz’s first book, and it’s a […]
May 1, 2018
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XIX: The Pure Products of America)”] Now that I have my hands on the whole of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes, […]
April 3, 2018
Diane Glancy and the Poetics of History
All history is contemporary history. So said Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher and editor of the early 20th century who championed the notion of history as inextricable from the sense […]
March 30, 2018
On Writing, Workshop & Mental Health: A Roundtable (Part 2)
Poetry is absolutely necessary for my mental health. Growing up, we never talked about well-being in my family– that is, directly. While my mother was easier to talk to, as […]
March 29, 2018
On Writing, Workshop & Mental Health: A Roundtable (Part 1)
The following began as a conversation on Twitter initiated by this tweet by Emma Bolden, which opened up a larger conversation about the writing life, workshop experiences, and how we deal […]
March 28, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XVIII: From the French for…)
[Continued from: “American Sonnets (Part XVII: An American Sonnet By Any Other Name)”] I stepped out of America for a moment in mentioning Rimbaud – as David Lehman did – […]