July 31, 2015
Not an Elegy for The University of Akron Press
We are still writing and revising the fate of The University of Akron Press. I say “we,” since the voices that matter to me are the voices of the poets, editors, […]
July 30, 2015
Teach This (Part V)
[Continued from earlier posts on teaching poetry] Robert Hayden’s “Night, Death, Mississippi” is a poem that horrifies me. Each time I encounter the domestic scene and colloquial voice, it feels like […]
June 18, 2015
Teach This (Part II)
Yesterday afternoon, I hit “Publish” on a blog post reflecting on widely anthologized and widely taught poems. My intention was not to criticize those poems (there are many good reasons […]
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
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 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 […]
January 26, 2015
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is a book deeply embedded in the body, in the body before race, as in the body unable to escape either itself or its color. Race ignites […]
November 13, 2014
Leaving Cedar Rapids
We just wanted to get home, seven people in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, airport thrown together by bad luck, a late flight, and something resembling apathy. Because the flight carrying […]
August 28, 2014
Meditation on Leslie Jamison’s THE EMPATHY EXAMS (and beyond…) (Part Four of Six)
(Continued from Part Three) When Jamison describes her experience of driving into the state—a moment more crucial than it might initially seem, because this essay, like The Empathy Exams as […]
August 27, 2014
Language, Race, and Reclamation
Aukeem Ballard, a friend and former student who is now a teacher himself, knows well the multiple and multivalent powers of language. His interest in how language works, how it […]
July 31, 2014
Meditation on Leslie Jamison’s THE EMPATHY EXAMS (Part One of Six)
In “Fog Count,” an essay in The Empathy Exams that spun out of her trip to visit a friend incarcerated in West Virginia, Leslie Jamison describes how she falls, weak-kneed, […]