October 18, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – October
In the beginning was the Word, I read again, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Whatever your theology, that’s a sublime lede. We call this […]
June 10, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – June
But does poetry actually change anything? Does it need to? Maybe poets are, as Percy Bysshe Shelley writes, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Or maybe W.H. Auden is right that […]
April 29, 2019
Public by Varying Degrees: Understanding Audience in Relation to Emily Dickinson’s Artistic Subject
Introduction Emily Dickinson’s attitude toward the literary marketplace has been widely contested by critics, who portray her as both shy poetess and self-aware genius in search of literary immortality. Given […]
May 4, 2018
Stuff People Say When You Tell Them You Write Poetry
1) Is this a hoax? 2) And they pay you for that? 3) And you tell people this? 4) Does your husband know? 5) Is that still a thing? […]
March 6, 2017
Painting the Since [Then]
This World is not Conclusion. A Species stands beyond – Invisible, as Music – But positive, as Sound – It beckons, and it baffles – —Emily Dickinson, “This World is not […]
September 9, 2016
How To
Who said—and I’m woefully paraphrasing—that each poem teaches you to read it in the reading of it? Or each poet teaches you to understand their personal language within the poems themselves? I […]
May 21, 2016
The joy that has no stem nor core
The joy that has no stem nor core, Nor seed that we can sow, Is edible to longing, But ablative to show. By fundamental palates Those products are preferred Impregnable […]
April 22, 2016
Clowns and Poetry (Part One)
Ann Arbor’s weather of late has been a bit berserk. It snowed two weeks ago; then it was eighty degrees. Today it’s gray and rainy, conditions that pass for spring-like […]
April 7, 2016
Let’s Not and Say We Did: on traveling and literary residencies
“If they told me I couldn’t leave the radius of six miles from my house, I really wouldn’t care. There’s nowhere I really want to go.” Thus saith poet and […]
December 17, 2015
A Last-Minute Shopper’s Guide to Children’s Poetry
Before my son was born, I memorized a poem. I know how this must sound to parents and non-parents: another hopelessly sentimental exercise that’s more about the papa than the […]
December 7, 2015
An Issue of Blood
This Thursday is Emily Dickinson’s 185th birthday; she was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she died in 1886. In 1885, she wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd, who […]
October 14, 2015
Elitism and American Poetry
The question of “the audience of poetry” is one that vexes poets and critics endlessly in our country. There are, on this as on so many other issues, two camps, […]