November 30, 2017
A Letter to My Women’s Studies Students
I probably won’t tell you this is up until after I turn in grades. I probably shouldn’t tell you that the grading system itself is archaic and not a measure […]
August 24, 2016
Poetry and Origin
Through the lens of Khaled Mattawa’s “History of My Face” and through the lens of Camille Rankine’s “Genealogy,” I’ve been thinking about poems as explorations of origins. When we think of “origin […]
July 1, 2016
First Person Plural: Part V (Genealogy)
Over the course of multiple posts, I’ve focused on poems that explore the first person plural – “we.” Most recently, I looked at Camille Rankine’s poem “Genealogy,” a poem that, though […]
June 29, 2016
First Person Plural: Part IV
I’m thinking again about Camille Rankine’s poetry and the first person plural—the more-than-singular self. In an earlier post, I spent time with Rankine’s poem “We,”a poem that invokes a collective […]
June 3, 2016
First Person Plural: Part II
In thinking about poems concerned with a sense of “we”—a first person plural—Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” might come to mind first. Last year, I did some thinking about that […]