June 28, 2013
What Makes Contemporary American Poetry So Good
One of the most wonderful things about being a writer in contemporary America—besides the unprecendented ease of access to books—is our multiplicity of traditions. In the past, in smaller, more homogenous […]
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. […]
January 5, 2013
The Alternate Bard: On Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems
Shakespeare’s narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were dedicated to an aristocrat, and full of the conceits and set-piece sequences and strict stanzas that appealed to […]
November 30, 2012
Effaced Ballads: An Interview with Matthew Rohrer, Anthony McCann, and Joshua Beckman on Erasing the Romantics
KR: It makes sense to me why a group of contemporary poets with more avant-garde than conservative aesthetics (though I use those terms with some trepidation) would choose to erase […]
November 16, 2012
The Literary Critic Considered as an Illuminator of Manuscripts
Of the forms literary criticism can take, the lowest asserts the critic’s taste in reading as a fact about a book; the middle attempts to draw general conclusions about […]
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 […]
July 15, 2012
Life Alone Lives Forever: Quest Stories and the Principle of Irreplaceability
I’ve read somewhere (in more than one place, I think) that all stories, or almost all stories, are variations on one story, treasured across cultures and eras, the Quest. The […]
March 18, 2012
The Unwritten Late-Life Poetry of John Keats as Adumbrated in a Posthumous Epistle
T. S. Eliot says somewhere Keats’s poetry hadn’t yet evolved to the point where it could express the philosophical mind we find in the Letters. Keats, at the time of […]
February 11, 2012
Reading List: Old-School Narrative Poems
We prefer our extended stories in prose now. That’s just the way it is. It’s not just American poetic culture that’s made this decision. It seems to be a common […]
December 21, 2011
A Massive Interview with the Massive Matt Hart
So: year’s end, and with it itemization of gratitude and wonder we were lucky enough to experience this past year. We’ve all got lists, but here’s one of the ways […]