April 11, 2019
“This thing I use to stay alive” – An Interview with Poet Husnaa Hashim
Husnaa Hashim is the author of Honey Sequence published by The Head & The Hand, a nonprofit, independent publishing company and writers’ workshop based in Philadelphia. She was the 2017-2018 Youth […]
October 25, 2017
Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part II)
[Continued from “Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part I)”] I trace Hayes’s “American Sonnet” impulse and form to Wanda Coleman, but Coleman and Hayes are certainly not alone in making the sonnet […]
October 24, 2017
Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part I)
There is a particular excitement in experiencing a favorite poet’s new project unfurl, if not in real time as its poems are written, then soon after, before a collection binds […]
July 25, 2016
Majestic Waste
Jay Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne (2011) album was a watershed moment in hip hop, specifically, and American culture broadly, though to say this is a bit redundant, […]
April 5, 2016
The Classic Crates Time Capsule: A Proposal
I play it cool I dig all jive That’s the reason I stay alive My motto as I live and learn Is dig and be dug in return —Langston Hughes, […]
March 30, 2016
Phife’s Islands
The third death of A Tribe Called Quest occurred last week with the passing of Phife Dawg. The first death came after The Love Movement, when the group broke up; […]
March 9, 2016
Poetry and Community: Events and Evidence
When we consider what enables a poem to endure, it’s easy to side with immediate fatalism and shoulder-shrugging, or opt for broad-brushed faith in long-term aesthetic exceptionalism and artistic meritocracy, without really considering the everyday […]
March 2, 2016
Different (Broad)sides
A “broadside” is, quite simply, a sheet of paper printed on a single side. Once also called a “broadsheet,” these could be typed up and posted as notices or advertising. Even early […]
January 12, 2016
No Father to His Style
On the Biz Markie’s smash hit “Just a Friend,” which I remember watching and singing along with on The Box, he sings a pleading, straining chorus over literally perfect music. […]
October 30, 2015
On Flamenco: Ellison, Lorca, and Me
“Cante Flamenco, or cante hondo [sic] (deep song, as the purer, less florid form is called) is a unique blending of Eastern and Western modes and as such it often […]
October 23, 2015
Gwendolyn Brooks & a Poetry of Collective Self
One of the best-known poems in the first-person plural is probably “We Real Cool,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, which first appeared in Poetry in September 1959, and was then published in her 1960 […]
September 25, 2015
Is Paris Still Paris?
“In a beautiful turn of phrase, Hugo von Hofmannsthal called [this city] ‘a landscape built of pure life.’ And at work in the attraction it exercises on people is the […]