September 6, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – September
I never expected math to help me become a poet. I wouldn’t say I became a poet to get away from math, but when I declared an English major, I […]
April 2, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – April
Relax. This is not a column about iambic pentameter. This is a column about the secret history of the English language. But the story of English happens to be the story […]
July 7, 2016
The Kangas of the World
My five-year-old daughter and I have been reading Winnie-the-Pooh this week. In the seventh chapter, the nativist Rabbit tries to drive out recent arrivals Kanga and Roo by kidnapping Roo […]
January 25, 2015
Let’s Play Two!
The recent death of Ernie Banks, at age 83, got me thinking about life spans: what we hope for, what we’ll accept. Banks lived a famously full life: he was […]
October 31, 2014
Boo
It’s Halloween; let’s light the cauldron. Shakespeare’s weird sisters, when making their hell-broth, tossed in “Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog”—and, […]
February 23, 2014
Birds and Brush Strokes
As readers, we have certain lines (or stanzas, or paragraphs) that we can’t get out of our heads. Maybe it’s just a phrase: Dickinson’s “Buccaneers of Buzz,” Larkin’s “not untrue […]
November 28, 2013
More Life
One of my daughters turns ten today. I’m not sure how much we’ll celebrate, seeing that it’s also Thanksgiving and the first day of Chanukah. Still, ten feels important—it’s the […]
October 22, 2012
A metaphysic of the page, a mode of inquiry called wonder: an interview with Dan Beachy-Quick
B. K. Fischer, writing about two of Dan Beachy-Quick’s books for the Boston Review, locates what she sees as a struggle for him and his contemporaries—or for any poet born […]
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 […]