May 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – May
The most important hip-hop “crossover” event of my youth was not Aerosmith and Run-DMC or Anthrax and Public Enemy or even the Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan tour. […]
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 […]
March 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – March
“Rhymes can make sense of the world in a way that regular speech can’t.” Hip hop mogul Jay-Z (Sean Carter) says it better than I can. It’s no coincidence that […]
January 2, 2015
When Goethe Met Napoleon
During Napoleon’s 1808 campaign in Germany, he visited his favorite author, Goethe. The two giants of the age met twice, once at Weimar and once at Erfurt. Andrew Roberts’s […]
May 27, 2014
Ars Prosaica: On Lines and Sentences
When I have a point to make, I write prose; when I have a sound to make, I write verse. This is a distinction based on ends. There is […]
July 15, 2013
Confessions of a Book Killer
Last Wednesday, I killed a book. I doubt anyone will miss it–Microphotography for Libraries: Papers presented to the Microphotography Symposium at the 1936 Conference of the American Library Association. Bound […]
September 12, 2012
Touching with the eye, seeing with the hand: erasure as reading experience
The term “erasure,” when used to describe a poetic technique, might be a kind of misnomer. To erase something is to “rub out or remove” it, according to the Oxford […]
May 13, 2012
The Reconquest of the Long Form
There are, by my count, only two things that can save a long poem in English. Heterogeneity (Eliot and Pound; and those polyphonic, formally quite various sustained dramatic poems of […]