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 […]
December 12, 2012
The Lessons of Objects: An Interview with Mark Doty
More than anything, Mark Doty seems to me an investigator of objects—of the things and beings that clutter the world, the microcosms inside microcosms inside our macrocosm. In his work […]
February 28, 2012
Of ideogrammar
Just the other day a professor and mentor of mine gave me a copy of Volume III of the late Larry Eigner’s recently-released Collected Poems. What demarcates this collection most […]
January 3, 2012
All I Ever Wanted To Be Was Frank O’Hara
I didn’t know enough, as a child, to want to be Frank O’Hara. Had I read those poems in my sleepy upstate New York hometown, I would have understood their […]
July 1, 2011
A Divagation on the Self-Portrait
It’s hard for me to come to a poem like Adam Zagajewski’s “Self-Portrait” (included in the latest issue of The Kenyon Review) without thinking of those lines from Charles Wright’s […]