May 29, 2019
Meditations in an Emergency: Ilya Kaminsky, Mad Men, and the Backdrop of War
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war. So ends […]
September 11, 2018
Luck, Lit, & Gutter Spouts
I was twenty-three years old when I won the Hopwood Award for Poetry. A recent college grad, I lived in a leaky apartment that I’d furnished with lawn furniture and […]
April 11, 2016
Cinematic Syntax
I started thinking about poetry and cinema after a visit to artist and filmmaker Karen Yasinsky’s Film & Media Studies class “Poetry and the Moving Image” at Johns Hopkins University. In her […]
February 17, 2014
Making Your Own Days, So to Speak
Another storm system is hurtling toward Michigan this evening. A half-foot of snow is expected, along with more gum-eraser skies. Haven’t we had enough of this already? Would somebody please […]
September 15, 2013
Imagining an Atemporal Utopia: Marjorie Perloff on Italian and Russian Futurism
[This post serves as the introduction for a soon-to-be-published interview with Perloff.] The present liminal state of literature—and its anxious reexamination of questions about materiality, representation, ethics, communication, community, and even […]
March 14, 2012
Daylight Savings & The Movable Dawn: A Postscript on the Aubade
About as soon as I posted my dialogue with her on the aubade, Tarfia sent me a link to Kenyon Review Writers Workshop faculty member Carl Phillips’ own “Aubade: Some […]
January 10, 2012
This Living Hand
I’m thinking about hands, but Jasper Johns, not Frank O’Hara, is to blame. Earnest grasping. That was what John Keats imagined the warm, living hand capable of performing in his […]
January 3, 2012
All I Ever Wanted To Be Was Frank O’Hara
I didn’t know enough, as a child, to want to be Frank O’Hara. Had I read those poems in my sleepy upstate New York hometown, I would have understood their […]
February 13, 2010
The Pleasure Principle
I’m back in New York City for a brief visit to celebrate my sweetie’s success and be with her for Valentine’s Day. This, then: a mash note of a blog […]