March 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – March
“Rhymes can make sense of the world in a way that regular speech can’t.” Hip hop mogul Jay-Z (Sean Carter) says it better than I can. It’s no coincidence that […]
February 11, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – February
It’s happening again. Even as we speak, elsewhere—in a college dorm, maybe, or some recess of the internet—a word is changing. Just as “cool” evolved in African-American jazz circles of the […]
January 3, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – January
“Education is not the filling of a pail,” reads the sign above my colleague’s desk, “but the lighting of a fire.” These lines—often attributed to the poet W. B. Yeats—happen […]
August 24, 2016
Poetry and Origin
Through the lens of Khaled Mattawa’s “History of My Face” and through the lens of Camille Rankine’s “Genealogy,” I’ve been thinking about poems as explorations of origins. When we think of “origin […]
June 17, 2015
Teach This, Not That!
I don’t mean that, of course. Whatever “this” and “that” are, I probably believe in teaching both of them. (This post’s title is really just a silly tongue-firmly-in-cheek reference to a […]
February 7, 2015
#poetinspaceproject
We’ve sent animals and plants into outer space and observed them. We’ve sent scientists of various disciplines to run experiments—that is, to do their work in that environment and […]
September 30, 2014
The Breaking of Jimbo: Some Thoughts on the Kathy Fagan poem “Road Memorial.” Part 2
In Part 1, I dreamed an account of events that would culminate in the arrival to my intro creative writing class of the poet Kathy Fagan. Part 1 itself ended with […]
September 28, 2014
The Breaking of Jimbo: Some Thoughts on the Kathy Fagan poem “Road Memorial.” Part 1.
Early this morning, a few minutes before the alarm went off, or maybe a few more than a few, I started writing this post. I was dreaming the writing, which […]
October 29, 2013
The Sea Sings: More Questions for Carl Phillips’s “Almost Tenderly”
In the poem “Almost Tenderly,” from Double Shadow and also Kenyon’s Radiance Versus Ordinary Light: Selected Poems by Carl Phillips, “a man, stripped, beaten” is on the shore, the sea […]
October 17, 2013
In “Almost Tenderly,” Imagining the “It”
In the Carl Phillips poem “Almost Tenderly,” included in his Double Shadow and also Kenyon’s Radiance Versus Ordinary Light: Selected Poems by Carl Phillips, a scene unfolds inside an “It.” […]
October 8, 2013
On “Fascination,” Part 1
My first Oxford English Dictionary was given to me as a gift sometime in the late Eighties by a pair of young artists who knew I wanted to be a […]
November 8, 2012
Entertainment and Excess: The Great Literary Audiences
At the most basic level, what’s success for a biological organism is success for a literary one—whatever survives, wins. A sequence of words has an effect on a given […]