May 13, 2019
“Generations of poetry bound together”: A Conversation with Native Voices Co-Editors CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader
CMarie Fuhrman is the co-editor of Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversations (Tupelo 2019) and author of poetry and nonfiction that has appeared in multiple journals including Cutthroat […]
May 13, 2019
“What Are You Doing?” and Other Questions to Ask Your Characters
In my second year of graduate school, I attended a reading by Charles Baxter, who was at that time a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This was in […]
May 10, 2019
The Music of Echo in Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”
1901 illustration to the poem by W. E. F. Britten Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters” responds to the following section from Homer’s The Odyssey: “I was driven from there by […]
May 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – May
The most important hip-hop “crossover” event of my youth was not Aerosmith and Run-DMC or Anthrax and Public Enemy or even the Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan tour. […]
April 29, 2019
Walking the Void: The Divided World of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
The narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Miles Coverdale (and Hawthorne himself as his preface shows), inhabits the space between the internal world of the writer and the external […]
April 28, 2019
“Can’t You Rest Now?”: Nightwood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Madness
I have a theory: the ending of Season 7, Episode 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Beneath You”) was inspired by Djuna Barnes’s queer modernist novel Nightwood (1936). I know it sounds […]
April 26, 2019
“Silences cultivate a kind of cognitive dance between reader and poem”: A Conversation with Major Jackson
Major Jackson is the author of four books of poetry, including Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is […]
April 26, 2019
In Defense of a Literary Canon
Mild controversy erupted on Twitter early this month after Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg released a list of his ten favorite books. To me, the list felt a little like […]
April 25, 2019
Publisher Spotlight: Leland Cheuk of 7.13 Books
A MacDowell Colony and Hawthornden Castle Fellow, Leland Cheuk is the author of three books, most recently, NO GOOD VERY BAD ASIAN, forthcoming from C&R Press in September 2019. His […]
April 23, 2019
On the Pleasures (and Pitfalls) of Pseudonyms
In August 2009, Joyce Carol Oates gave a talk at Cornell University called “The Writer’s (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration,” in which she discussed her long career, the effects […]
April 22, 2019
Do We Write for Others or Ourselves?
Last year, I wrote a piece for this blog about Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Secret Miracle,” arguing that it was the ultimate consolation for a writer, because it […]
April 21, 2019
Jordan Peele’s Us Exposes America’s Shadow Self
This is the first in my new series, American Gothic: Investigating Horror, Ghosts, Monsters, & Haunted Houses. Stay tuned for more… After Jordan Peele’s movie Us introduces the Wilson family […]