July 3, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – July
Sometimes a mismatched couple wanders by, and the whispers begin before they’ve even passed. Meanwhile, they stroll on, blissfully unaware, as if they were the most obvious pair in the […]
May 31, 2019
Why American Poets Ought to Translate More Poems
As literary translators go, I am mostly a fraud, and thus beset by a fear that all frauds—from TV psychics to reality TV presidents—share: to be exposed by those who […]
May 5, 2016
Why I’m Still Not Convinced that Meter is Physiological
I sparked a small feud last month when I wrote in this blog that “Iambic Pentameter Has Nothing to Do with Your Heart.” My essay took issue with a “pulse […]
April 16, 2016
Iambic Pentameter Has Nothing to Do with Your Heart
It is time that all poets, critics, and readers dispense with the following metaphor: the iamb is a heartbeat. Let us refrain from settling arguments (or starting them) by asking […]
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 […]
April 8, 2015
Trophies
In The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry, Rick Barot, one of the book’s contributors, offers this bit of testimony about his development as a writer: For years, what I cared about […]
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 […]
August 6, 2014
Laurels and Hardy
I’ve been thinking about the North Carolina poet laureate controversy. As you may have heard, Governor Pat McCrory appointed Valerie Macon, a self-published and (from the little evidence available online) […]
June 16, 2014
Their Aim Is Just Off
We all have our people: writers or singers or actors or comedians who shaped us and sustained us and to whom we remain loyal, because to forget them would be […]
September 6, 2012
Mix Tape: Inventors, Masters, Starters of Crazes
Will the old writing you’ve disowned—the poems full of mixed metaphors, the stories you never knew how to end, the essays that seem to fall flat—follow you around forever? And, […]
February 28, 2012
Of ideogrammar
Just the other day a professor and mentor of mine gave me a copy of Volume III of the late Larry Eigner’s recently-released Collected Poems. What demarcates this collection most […]
July 4, 2010
Ain’t That America
Today marks the 155th anniversary of the publication of Leaves of Grass. The 36-year-old Whitman had hoped to write a “new American Bible,” a work that you, the reader, might […]