February 7, 2017
Notes on BANANA PALACE or Fourteen Ways of Looking at Dana Levin
1. Toward the end of Dana Levin’s remarkable book of poems Banana Palace, a poem entitled “At the End of My Hours” closes its first section like this: . . . […]
February 6, 2017
On “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen”: Identity in Form
When I first encountered Chen Chen’s poem “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen,” another example of a poet engaged with the anagram as a formal construct (I have considered, in varying […]
February 1, 2017
Echoes and Mirrors (Innovation in Conversation: Part III)
One of the joys of teaching, and of writing for the Kenyon Review blog, is the two-way street of ideas and information these forums afford. While I hope I’m educating in […]
January 30, 2017
On Carrying Each Other & Cosmic Debt
The world is gone, I must carry you. —Paul Celan If my father was not the kind of person he is, it would be a touchy subject. It bears […]
January 17, 2017
Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks In Form: An Interview with Peter Kahn
In writing about the formal innovations of Terrance Hayes here on The Kenyon Review blog, I noted the soon-forthcoming The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. This wasn’t the first time I’d […]
January 15, 2017
An Open Letter from the Only Poet on the Professor Watchlist
Dear Charlie Kirk, Founder of Turning Point USA: It’s not every day that an American poet can address someone who thinks he is dangerous. For that alone I should thank […]
January 14, 2017
Innovation in Conversation: Part II
In my last post, I segued from thinking about Terrance Hayes’s formal innovation to thinking about other poets’ formal innovations (and the possible conversations or influences therein), spending time with Randall Mann’s “Straight […]
January 8, 2017
Snowstorms and Speculation: My Abbreviated 2016 Reading List
I generally don’t make New Year’s resolutions, and I also don’t go out of my way to eat black-eyed peas or sauerkraut on January 1, but I do have a […]
January 8, 2017
Happy 100th Birthday, Peter Taylor
It is customary on a writer’s birthday, especially on a date so significant as his 100th, to grant his life and work a few moments of your attention. Today we […]
January 6, 2017
Innovation in Conversation: Part I
In thinking about formal innovation in the poetry of Terrance Hayes in my last post, it struck me that, paradoxically, innovation loves company. As a reader, when I encounter formal “newness,” […]
December 29, 2016
The Great Work Begins
Late in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika, Belize tells Louis, “You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy […]
December 29, 2016
If in Poetry We Are What Would Replace Us
the way a searchlight listens over a lake it was the prayer-word out of your mouth your thousand-noun request it goes up up to the florescent weather […]