December 10, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – December
What makes poetry poetry? Ask that question of a dozen poets, scholars, or readers and you’ll get as many different answers, maybe more. Some won’t be much help: “Poetry is […]
October 25, 2016
The Mad Realtor’s Song
This is my two hundredth post for this blog, and I had planned to mark that milestone by writing about John Berryman. It’s his birthday today—a birthday we should celebrate. […]
October 4, 2016
Adventures in Trumpland
What would Lewis Carroll have made of Donald Trump? In an 1875 letter to The Spectator, Carroll (or, really, Charles Dodgson, the don behind the pseudonym) lamented the ways in which the […]
January 27, 2016
The Rhinoceros and the Hippopotamus
Where is the great nonsense of our time? You might say that our political world is replete with nonsense, but that’s not the kind of nonsense I mean. True nonsense […]
December 31, 2015
This Beautiful Skin of Ice
In yesterday’s scramble to learn what I could about the novelist Adrian Barnes, I happened upon several interviews and essays in which Barnes names Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as his […]
November 30, 2015
Looking. Looking Again (Part Two)
If it’s good to look, might it be better still to look again? That’s my hope—and I’ve been betting my writing life on that hope all year. I wrote about […]
September 29, 2015
He Looked Again, And Found It Was . . .
A couple of days ago on this blog, Dora Malech wrote: “In poetry workshops and literature courses, I always emphasize poetic turns (not just in sonnets) and the pleasures and […]
December 17, 2012
Why Ashbery is So Dull
Those who dislike John Ashbery’s poetry often complain that they “don’t understand it.” As any Ashbery fan will explain, while secretly thinking you a retrogressive muggle, there is nothing to […]
August 2, 2012
Topographed: a new approach to poetic geography
Over the past few months, I’ve traveled from Hayward, California to Washington, D.C., then from D.C. to Manassas and Remington in Virginia, then to backwoods West Virginia—Hinton, Beckley, and the […]
June 8, 2012
Short Takes: Cutting It Out, Keeping It In
Gangs of robots, social expectations, and charting syllogisms: if George Saunders, Lewis Carroll, and many others had written the much-maligned Twilight series. C. S. Lewis on “the thing” writers write […]
May 4, 2009
Riddles That Have No Answers
As I continue to age — dramatically, and, in a friend’s recent words, against my “express wishes” — I begin to think differently about the young. More and more, they […]