June 15, 2018
Pros[onn]e[t]
[Continued from “Crawlspace”] * Thinking about contemporary sonnets, shadow sonnets, American Sonnets, and so on and so[nnet] on, I’m fascinated both by the poems themselves and by what the poems […]
March 24, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XVII: An American Sonnet by Any Other Name)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XVI: ‘What’s up ahead / which is resistance’)”] In the “Brief Glossary of Forms and Other Terms” at the end of David Lehman’s Ecstatic Occasions, […]
February 16, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XV: Some Sonnets)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XIV: Stein’s Sonnet)”] I’m going by memory and intuition here in tracing some kind of history of the formally subversive American sonnet – I hope […]
January 27, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XII: Precursors)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XI: Insistence)”] Terrance Hayes ended a 2006 post for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, by writing that “it is possible to value two very different things at […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]