December 10, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – December
What makes poetry poetry? Ask that question of a dozen poets, scholars, or readers and you’ll get as many different answers, maybe more. Some won’t be much help: “Poetry is […]
June 15, 2018
Pros[onn]e[t]
[Continued from “Crawlspace”] * Thinking about contemporary sonnets, shadow sonnets, American Sonnets, and so on and so[nnet] on, I’m fascinated both by the poems themselves and by what the poems […]
February 2, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XIII: The Hinges)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XII: Precursors)”] Terrance Hayes connects with Harryette Mullen connects with Gertrude Stein connects with Terrance Hayes. The links (hyper- and literary) above aren’t just from […]
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,” […]
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 […]
December 21, 2016
Oulipo-Adjacent: Harryette Mullen
In my last post on Unica Zürn and the poetics of the anagram, I briefly mentioned the Oulipo writers, often the first group to come to mind when one thinks of constraint-based writing […]
August 29, 2015
Fran Ross, Like a Boss
In her foreword to the first reissue of Fran Ross’s Oreo, Harryette Mullen writes, “With its mix of vernacular dialects, bilingual and ethnic humor, inside jokes, neologisms, verbal quirks, and […]