September 11, 2018
Luck, Lit, & Gutter Spouts
I was twenty-three years old when I won the Hopwood Award for Poetry. A recent college grad, I lived in a leaky apartment that I’d furnished with lawn furniture and […]
June 30, 2017
Where I Get My Ideas
From readings, where I scrawl notes in tiny, messy handwriting on the backs of old receipts I’ve dug up from the bottom of my bag. From weddings, especially if something […]
May 18, 2017
“I am a little world made cunningly”: The Poem, the Map, the Self
“I am a little world made cunningly,” begins John Donne’s fifth Holy Sonnet. It becomes clear in the context of the poem that the subject of the sentence and line, its […]
November 30, 2016
Strangers Meant (to be) Un-stranged
Your map is marred by borders that become a sieve of history, straining the wild from the willing. Missions and malls encroach your sun swathed villitas where flowers battle […]
November 29, 2015
Looking. Looking Again (Part One)
Earlier this month I spent some time at the University of Washington’s Marine Station in Friday Harbor. The occasion was the UW’s fourth annual Poetry and Science Symposium; a terrific […]
October 31, 2015
Lowell, Bishop, Berryman
In today’s New York Times, Christopher Isherwood reviews Dear Elizabeth, a play by Sarah Ruhl that tracks the friendship (mostly epistolary) of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Isherwood writes something […]
February 23, 2015
Rotten, Rotten, Rotten
We’re seven weeks into the winter semester—and my students have written some terrible poems. It’s OK; I’ve asked them to. We’ve been reading W. D. Snodgrass’s De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems […]
January 26, 2015
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is a book deeply embedded in the body, in the body before race, as in the body unable to escape either itself or its color. Race ignites […]
October 17, 2013
Salter in the House
I’ve never been able to locate a working time machine—which leaves me, tonight, in a worse-than-usual-fix. Because I need to travel back to earlier this evening and exhort anyone within […]
February 7, 2013
Up Close, and at Some Distance: Remembering Elizabeth Bishop
It’s hard to imagine learning to write without having read Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. At nineteen years old, I was a bandana-wearing hippie and a burgeoning feminist when my professor at […]
December 22, 2012
Language as an Artistic Medium
Visual art, language, and music fall along a spectrum whose two ends are the “representative” and the “nonrepresentative.” By “representation” I mean of the physical world. Historically, a visual art […]
June 20, 2012
Short Takes: Theory of Sublimity
“Soda,” or “pop”? Here’s a more nuanced answer (maybe) to accents, intonations, inflections, and everything else that makes speech interesting. Ben Lerner, setting it straight in The New Yorker: “…I’m […]