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
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 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 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 […]
November 27, 2017
American Sonnets (Part IV: As American As…)
[Continued from “Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part III: Hayes and The Confidence of Influence”] When I first decided to write about Terrance Hayes’s new “American Sonnet for My Past and Future […]
November 25, 2017
Mix-Tape III: Thankfulness as Wakefulness
Over the autumn break this week, my husband and I flew to South Texas to spend time with my family. Less than a week ago, my Aunt Olivia had been […]
November 21, 2017
That Time I Fell in Love with Gargantua (Is Always Now)
In a way, I learned to love my home better by saying goodbye to it… For so long I had alternated between hating and cherishing it; now, finally, I […]
November 15, 2017
Christopher Soto on the June Jordan Teaching Corp
DM: Dr. Joshua Bennett and The Center for Justice at Columbia University have invited you to teach a community-based writing workshop that serves both the Columbia University student body and also members […]
November 6, 2017
Motherhood as a Form of Haunting
Every Halloween I like to ponder how we’re all haunted houses, attended always by the ghosts of future and past, misunderstood monsters, mad women in our own attics. As a […]
October 30, 2017
Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part III: Hayes and The Confidence of Influence)
[Continued from “Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part II)”] While my intention in my last post was simply to begin to connect Wanda Coleman’s “American Sonnets” with Terrance Hayes’s “American Sonnets for […]