December 7, 2017
American Sonnets (Part VI: Hayes In His Own Words)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part V: Hayes In His Own Words)”] Terrance Hayes’s conversation with Rachel Zucker, discussed in my previous post, is certainly not the only conversation in which […]
December 5, 2017
American Sonnets (Part V: Hayes in His Own Words)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part IV: As American As…)”] Hayes himself confirms some of the contextualizing ground I’ve covered in the past few posts in talking about his new American Sonnet […]
November 27, 2017
American Sonnets (Part IV: As American As…)
[Continued from “Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part III: Hayes and The Confidence of Influence”] When I first decided to write about Terrance Hayes’s new “American Sonnet for My Past and Future […]
October 24, 2017
Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part I)
There is a particular excitement in experiencing a favorite poet’s new project unfurl, if not in real time as its poems are written, then soon after, before a collection binds […]
September 5, 2017
New Poems by Oliver de la Paz and Danez Smith
Two new poems that have moved me most deeply recently are Oliver de la Paz’s “Autism Screening Questionnaire – Speech and Language Delay” in the July/August 2017 issue of Poetry and […]
August 24, 2017
Formal Innovation and Stephen Kampa’s “Another Way of Breaking the Pen-tameter”
When I read a new essay like Stephen Kampa’s “Another Way of Breaking the Pen-tameter,” which directly engages with a number of the directions I’ve explored here at the Kenyon […]
February 27, 2017
Innovation in Conversation (Part IV): Speaking with Randall Mann, Richie Hofmann, Phillip B. Williams, and Chen Chen
Over the past few months, I’ve spent time here at The Kenyon Review blog with the art and thought of contemporary poets engaged in formal innovation, focusing in particular on […]
February 6, 2017
On “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen”: Identity in Form
When I first encountered Chen Chen’s poem “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen,” another example of a poet engaged with the anagram as a formal construct (I have considered, in varying […]
February 1, 2017
Echoes and Mirrors (Innovation in Conversation: Part III)
One of the joys of teaching, and of writing for the Kenyon Review blog, is the two-way street of ideas and information these forums afford. While I hope I’m educating in […]
January 17, 2017
Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks In Form: An Interview with Peter Kahn
In writing about the formal innovations of Terrance Hayes here on The Kenyon Review blog, I noted the soon-forthcoming The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. This wasn’t the first time I’d […]
January 14, 2017
Innovation in Conversation: Part II
In my last post, I segued from thinking about Terrance Hayes’s formal innovation to thinking about other poets’ formal innovations (and the possible conversations or influences therein), spending time with Randall Mann’s “Straight […]
January 6, 2017
Innovation in Conversation: Part I
In thinking about formal innovation in the poetry of Terrance Hayes in my last post, it struck me that, paradoxically, innovation loves company. As a reader, when I encounter formal “newness,” […]