December 22, 2016
The End of the Line: Terrance Hayes and Formal Innovation
If asked whose formal innovations have most influenced a current generation of younger poets, the first name out of my mouth would be Terrance Hayes. His “Golden Shovel” form is a […]
December 21, 2016
Oulipo-Adjacent: Harryette Mullen
In my last post on Unica Zürn and the poetics of the anagram, I briefly mentioned the Oulipo writers, often the first group to come to mind when one thinks of constraint-based writing […]
October 22, 2015
1,369 Light Bulbs, or, How to Write in a Basement
Ralph Ellison wrote the first page of Invisible Man while staying at a friend’s farm in Waitsfield, Vermont. He had been to the farm before, and upon his first visit […]
July 20, 2015
Poetry and Play (Part I)
When I was in Amsterdam earlier this summer, the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga came up in multiple conversations about poetry; more specifically, his 1938 book Homo Ludens: Proeve […]