February 11, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – February
It’s happening again. Even as we speak, elsewhere—in a college dorm, maybe, or some recess of the internet—a word is changing. Just as “cool” evolved in African-American jazz circles of the […]
May 10, 2017
On Why Poem Titles Matter (Part 1 of 2)
I. Names Poems are not people. They resist qualitative judgments based on their actions or potential—it doesn’t matter that a poem is musical. So is music. Perhaps this is why […]
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 […]
December 22, 2016
The End of the Line: Terrance Hayes and Formal Innovation
If asked whose formal innovations have most influenced a current generation of younger poets, the first name out of my mouth would be Terrance Hayes. His “Golden Shovel” form is a […]
June 3, 2016
First Person Plural: Part II
In thinking about poems concerned with a sense of “we”—a first person plural—Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” might come to mind first. Last year, I did some thinking about that […]
October 23, 2015
Gwendolyn Brooks & a Poetry of Collective Self
One of the best-known poems in the first-person plural is probably “We Real Cool,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, which first appeared in Poetry in September 1959, and was then published in her 1960 […]
April 3, 2015
Even if You Close Your Eyes: William Pope.L’s Trinket
“Art hurts. Art urges voyages – / and it is easier to stay at home…” -Gwendolyn Brooks In William Pope.L’s exhibition William Pope.L: Trinket currently on view at MOCA Geffen […]
December 9, 2012
Short Takes: By the Letter, By the Draft
August Wilson: “Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are […]