May 18, 2017
“I am a little world made cunningly”: The Poem, the Map, the Self
“I am a little world made cunningly,” begins John Donne’s fifth Holy Sonnet. It becomes clear in the context of the poem that the subject of the sentence and line, its […]
November 8, 2012
Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences
At the most basic level, what’s success for a biological organism is success for a literary one—whatever survives, wins. A sequence of words has an effect on a given […]
August 2, 2012
Topographed: a new approach to poetic geography
Over the past few months, I’ve traveled from Hayward, California to Washington, D.C., then from D.C. to Manassas and Remington in Virginia, then to backwoods West Virginia—Hinton, Beckley, and the […]