July 23, 2019
Mix-Tape VII: All the Eguanas for What We Can’t Say
There are things happening right now in many families, like my own, too painful to share. So I will share this instead: My husband B spells iguana with an “E.” […]
June 3, 2018
Little Monsters: On Language {Enunciation}
With her severed tongue the shewolf Scoops live water from the jaws of a cloud And again becomes whole —“Burning Shewolf,” Vasko Popa (trans. by Charles Simic) Upon […]
February 28, 2018
Anyway What’s Left Of These Two Worlds Collided
I I was standing You were there Two worlds collided And they could never tear us apart —“Never Tear Us Apart,” INXS A year ago, when we first met, you […]
November 21, 2017
That Time I Fell in Love with Gargantua (Is Always Now)
In a way, I learned to love my home better by saying goodbye to it… For so long I had alternated between hating and cherishing it; now, finally, I […]
September 26, 2017
Returning to New Houses We Rebuild Together
Yesterday, you began this essay with: She bears the wood and the forgotten knowledge of the wood, carries its many names, a weight that brings the poet no unity. And […]
March 14, 2017
Voyager I Am Singing the Fire
Jews, we sing the fire. Our song is of people who care for the fire. We sang from inside fire. For thousands of years in the diaspora, our fire survived through […]
February 18, 2016
The Weight that Will Make Us Planets
A week before the Lunar New Year, an old friend whom you met only last year drops you a line, which means you Skype. Lately the computer freezes because he’s […]
August 27, 2014
Language, Race, and Reclamation
Aukeem Ballard, a friend and former student who is now a teacher himself, knows well the multiple and multivalent powers of language. His interest in how language works, how it […]
August 25, 2014
What About Foghat? (Part 1 of 3)
In her essay “On Being Ill” Virginia Woolf ponders (and wanders through) the major themes of literature—jealousy, love, war—and the writers who have taught us how to speak on these […]
November 23, 2013
There are no Coincidences: Language and Apophenia
I have a peculiar mystical inkling about language, or rather about languages in the same language group or family, which is that there are no coincidences. Translingual synapses form, […]
November 4, 2013
Blasphemy’s Implicit Exaltation of Language
A poet’s concern that his poems are failures is nothing new. The difference, beginning in the 20th century, has been where we place the blame. We used to say: […]
December 22, 2012
Language as an Artistic Medium
Visual art, language, and music fall along a spectrum whose two ends are the “representative” and the “nonrepresentative.” By “representation” I mean of the physical world. Historically, a visual art […]