January 17, 2018
An Interview with Naima Coster
Naima Coster’s debut novel, Halsey Street, examines critical issues such as gender, gentrification, anger, and art making. Recently Coster wrote a thoughtful, important essay on the significance of having a […]
January 16, 2018
American Sonnets (Part X: Box, Box, Boxes, Boxes In)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part IX: Concept and Impact)”] I’ve been pulled in two directions in my reading and thinking in the past few weeks. I’ve been writing posts inspired […]
January 11, 2018
The Little Mermaid and the Little Girl Writer Part Two
While Ariel barters her art for romance, Ursula remains witchy and creative. As she sings her story-song in the film, she conjures images of what she’s describing above her cauldron […]
January 5, 2018
The Little Mermaid and the Little Girl Writer Part One
I will never forget sitting in the front row of that movie theater watching The Little Mermaid, wide-eyed, wondering what happened to that discarded mermaid tail. Did the witch store […]
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 […]
December 5, 2017
American Sonnets (Part V: Hayes in His Own Words)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part IV: As American As…)”] Hayes himself confirms some of the contextualizing ground I’ve covered in the past few posts in talking about his new American Sonnet […]
November 28, 2017
Why I Love “Low” Art
Where to begin with why I have always valued entertainment considered (by snobs, let’s be honest) to be “lowbrow”? For one thing, this preference led me to my dissertation. I […]