May 28, 2018
Age of Glass
[Continued from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin] Oh, the delight, when, after thinking about American sonnets for some weeks here at the Kenyon Review blog, the Cleveland […]
January 19, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XI: Insistence)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part X: Box, Box, Boxes, Boxes In)”] In addition to the overlapping concerns of form and content I began to consider in the previous post, Stein’s […]
January 16, 2018
American Sonnets (Part X: Box, Box, Boxes, Boxes In)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part IX: Concept and Impact)”] I’ve been pulled in two directions in my reading and thinking in the past few weeks. I’ve been writing posts inspired […]
December 14, 2017
American Sonnets (Part VII: Close-up on Coleman)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part VI: Hayes In His Own Words)”] Wanda Coleman’s 100 American Sonnets span several collections of her poems, a series that reads as both a cohesive […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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,” […]