April 10, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XIX: The Pure Products of America)
[Continued from: “American Sonnets (Part XVIII: From the French for…)”] Rimbaud’s addition to the lineage of both disguised form a la Auden and the “American” sonnet is more than speculative; […]
March 28, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XVIII: From the French for…)
[Continued from: “American Sonnets (Part XVII: An American Sonnet By Any Other Name)”] I stepped out of America for a moment in mentioning Rimbaud – as David Lehman did – […]
November 16, 2017
A Brief Measure of Richard Wilbur
I noticed that several poets the other day, responding to the latest National Book Award longlist, declared our era a “golden age” of poetry. With the death of Richard Wilbur […]
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 […]
July 15, 2015
Old News: The Consequences of our Cultural Obsession with Newness
There’s nothing new about our love of newness. “Men love that song which is newest on their ears”—that’s Homer, writing as early as Europe’s second epic poem. The problem […]
May 27, 2014
Ars Prosaica: On Lines and Sentences
When I have a point to make, I write prose; when I have a sound to make, I write verse. This is a distinction based on ends. There is […]
November 16, 2012
The Literary Critic Considered as an Illuminator of Manuscripts
Of the forms literary criticism can take, the lowest asserts the critic’s taste in reading as a fact about a book; the middle attempts to draw general conclusions about […]
February 12, 2012
The Fact of a Poem
Earlier this week, while there were some interesting—and interestingly broad—reactions to the excerpts from the forthcoming/arriving book The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal printed in […]