December 22, 2015
Children’s Poetry: Four Short Takes
With just a few days until America’s bookstores close their doors and count their pennies, I thought it best to condense my final recommendations for children’s poetry. Here are four […]
August 20, 2013
Virtues of Madness and Vices of Honey: An Interview with Mary Ruefle
[This interview was preceded by an introduction; you can read that here.] Last year, Ruefle and I corresponded via mail; our correspondence is printed below. You can find out more […]
August 12, 2013
Lectures With Nothing (Or Everything) To Say: On Mary Ruefle
[This post serves as the introduction for a soon-to-be-published interview with Ruefle.] The function of the anecdote in criticism is double-edged: at once ailment and salve. But in considering Mary […]
November 30, 2012
Effaced Ballads: An Interview with Matthew Rohrer, Anthony McCann, and Joshua Beckman on Erasing the Romantics
KR: It makes sense to me why a group of contemporary poets with more avant-garde than conservative aesthetics (though I use those terms with some trepidation) would choose to erase […]
November 6, 2012
The Weight of What’s Left [Out]: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft
The choice to use erasure as a poetic technique is not, strictly speaking, a new one: in 1969, for instance, Marcel Broodthaers erased Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le […]
October 25, 2012
Politics, erasure, and a ‘sometimes genuine music’
The question I want to ask is whether or not the act of erasure produces another voice—if the process of effacing (or defacing, as such may be a more accurate […]
October 17, 2012
The doublespeak of texts and subtexts: indicting the found political poem
The found political poem is a sort of chimera, a cross-breeding of two genres in which questions of authorship and ownership—and the fine distinction between them—run amok. One of its […]
September 22, 2012
Shakespeare’s body, Shakespeare’s ghost: erasure, canonicity, and the apophatic self
I’ll begin with a claim: that every text produces in its writer a sense of the self becoming unglued—that one creates, or expunges, meaning in the form of a literary […]
September 16, 2012
Stitching shut the holes: on concealed erasure
I began my last post with a discussion of the multiple valences the word “erasure” has when used to describe a poetic technique. But just as there are many different […]
September 12, 2012
Touching with the eye, seeing with the hand: erasure as reading experience
The term “erasure,” when used to describe a poetic technique, might be a kind of misnomer. To erase something is to “rub out or remove” it, according to the Oxford […]
August 26, 2012
Theft as art, art as theft: an interview with Austin Kleon
In a 1966 interview with The Paris Review—the same interview that would inspire artist Tom Phillips to first employ the techniques that led him to create A Humument—William S. Burroughs […]
March 21, 2012
Craft Note: The Elegy (part one)
[Blogger’s note: This post is part of a series of craft notes that look forward to the work Tarfia Faizullah and I will be doing at the Kenyon Review Writers […]