May 31, 2019
Why American Poets Ought to Translate More Poems
As literary translators go, I am mostly a fraud, and thus beset by a fear that all frauds—from TV psychics to reality TV presidents—share: to be exposed by those who […]
December 16, 2014
Patterns of Poetic Revolution
One of the most famous lines in English poetry about poetry is Moore’s “I, too, dislike it.” The interesting thing is just how much the best poets, historically, have […]
April 16, 2014
Magical Mystery Tour: Science as the New Authority
In Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage from The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor’s plan to “correct” the work of God (in a sense, to establish the Church) was based on […]
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, […]
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 […]