May 11, 2018
A Conversation with poet July Westhale
The Necessity of Dangerous Poetry and the Power of Voice July Westhale visited Kirsten Ogden’s class at Pasadena City College in April 2018 and continued a conversation with students over […]
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; […]
February 16, 2016
Life of a Poem, Part II
In my last post, I spent some time with the first line of George Starbuck’s poem “Of Late.” “‘Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his […]
December 8, 2015
Delmore Schwartz: Be With Me Now
Right now I want something I don’t believe in. –James Galvin, “Blue or Green” In a hard time, Tarfia Faizullah showed me Jack Gilbert’s “Failing and Flying” and Jane Lewty showed […]
November 29, 2015
“Merely in living as and where we live”: Part II
Last week, on a bright, blustery Baltimore morning, Joseph Harrison rang the doorbell at 32 W 25th Street, and we entered Royal Books. Specializing in first editions, the store is a book […]
October 25, 2015
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Irrelevance
With the American government sending drones overseas, with our military involved over the past decade in conflict after dirty conflict; with the largest incarcerated population in the world, and […]
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 […]
August 28, 2015
A Postcard from–
My Johns Hopkins colleague Hollis Robbins (director of the JHU Center for Africana Studies and chair of the humanities department at the Peabody Institute) recently wrote an article for The Chronicle of […]
July 29, 2015
The Poet’s Salter: An Appreciation of James Salter
About a year and a half ago I began writing a fan letter to James Salter. Salter was in residence at the University of Virginia, and this fact, I thought, […]
December 10, 2014
Earl Sweatshirt’s Bookshelf, and Time
Bookshelves do funny things to time. In a recent clip, rapper Earl Sweatshirt lets FADER TV tour his Hollywood bachelor pad. In a Cribs send-up, he guides the camera through […]
November 28, 2013
Happy Birthday to “Midnight”
A few weeks ago, an important literary event went unnoticed in the literary world: Midnight Marauders turned twenty. Midnight, the third album of legendary hip hop group A Tribe Called […]