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 […]
February 19, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XVI: “what’s up ahead / which is resistance”)
[Continued from: “American Sonnets (Part XV: Some Sonnets)”] Ashbery’s second book The Tennis Court Oath, published in 1962, contained “Two Sonnets” too—directly after “America” and a few poems removed from “‘They Dream […]
February 16, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XV: Some Sonnets)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XIV: Stein’s Sonnet)”] I’m going by memory and intuition here in tracing some kind of history of the formally subversive American sonnet – I hope […]
November 2, 2017
“Finally all indications of a subject / Began to fade”
The poet John Ashbery died on September 3, 2017, and I spent September and October reading the flood of reminiscences. It interests me that Ashbery—he of the slippery speaker(s) and […]
September 7, 2017
Remembering John Ashbery’s Time and Space
Vladimir Nabokov’s confession in Speak, Memory (1951) that he does not believe in time might have been more shocking if it had come earlier in literary history; by the modernist […]
September 6, 2017
Thinking about John Ashbery
It’s been heartening to see the many tributes online to John Ashbery, who died on Sunday at the age of ninety. Has anyone given to the our language what Ashbery […]
July 26, 2017
NSFW: On “Hysterical Literature,” Leaves of Grass, and the Sexy Reading Movement
Somewhere in the foggy realm between performance art and porno, on a YouTube channel where a poem drives up page views, a woman reads aloud from a paperback book. She […]
May 30, 2015
Poetry and Chess
I was perusing YouTube for new movie trailers, as I do sometimes in between cases at work. Confession: I never intend to go watch the flick unless it’s a new […]
March 3, 2015
Night Thoughts (I)
Dickinson’s dashes and erratic capitalizations seem unusual or eccentric only to those who are unfamiliar with 19th century letter-writing. Byron’s letters, for example, are punctuated entirely in Dickinsonese, and similarly […]
October 19, 2014
The iPhone Considered as a Work of Art
Is my iPhone a 21st century work of art? The exquisite touch of realism in the faint shadows under the icons at the bottom: The sleek, Brancusi-like sleekness of line […]
November 9, 2013
With or Without You: Government Censorship and Literary Creativity
Good Queen Bess, absolute monarch during the great flowering of English drama, had a hair-trigger policy on censorship. No writer was allowed to criticize the Queen or her policy on […]
March 25, 2013
Why I Don’t Teach Poetry Writing
What are we teaching when we teach the writing of poetry? Much of what we call the “teaching” of poetry is actually the teaching of contemporary conventions governing poetry. […]