March 12, 2015
How to Write Human: Outkast’s Art of Storytellin’
Literature is at its best when it humanizes its characters and, by extension, its readers. The poetry of the duo Outkast, comprised of Big Boi and Andre 3000, peels back the […]
January 19, 2014
Anne Sexton and Poetic Atavism
Rereading the Collected Poems of Anne Sexton, she seems to me to have become, over her career, the least “Confessional” of the poets given that label. Apparently she suffered […]
September 30, 2013
The Poetics of Campus Security Alerts
Someone needs to write the book on a new genre of literature gripping the land. It is a short form; its characters are stock; its storylines nearly never begin in […]
May 20, 2012
The Reproductive Success of a Poem
There’s more than one way of conceiving of the “success” of a poem; one that’s never talked about is its biological/evolutionary success, that is: How effectively does it replicate itself? […]
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 […]