May 28, 2018
Age of Glass
[Continued from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin] Oh, the delight, when, after thinking about American sonnets for some weeks here at the Kenyon Review blog, the Cleveland […]
January 19, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XI: Insistence)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part X: Box, Box, Boxes, Boxes In)”] In addition to the overlapping concerns of form and content I began to consider in the previous post, Stein’s […]
October 25, 2017
Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part II)
[Continued from “Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part I)”] I trace Hayes’s “American Sonnet” impulse and form to Wanda Coleman, but Coleman and Hayes are certainly not alone in making the sonnet […]
October 24, 2017
Hayes’s American Sonnets (Part I)
There is a particular excitement in experiencing a favorite poet’s new project unfurl, if not in real time as its poems are written, then soon after, before a collection binds […]
August 24, 2017
Formal Innovation and Stephen Kampa’s “Another Way of Breaking the Pen-tameter”
When I read a new essay like Stephen Kampa’s “Another Way of Breaking the Pen-tameter,” which directly engages with a number of the directions I’ve explored here at the Kenyon […]
February 27, 2017
Innovation in Conversation (Part IV): Speaking with Randall Mann, Richie Hofmann, Phillip B. Williams, and Chen Chen
Over the past few months, I’ve spent time here at The Kenyon Review blog with the art and thought of contemporary poets engaged in formal innovation, focusing in particular on […]
February 6, 2017
On “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen”: Identity in Form
When I first encountered Chen Chen’s poem “Chen [No Middle Name] Chen,” another example of a poet engaged with the anagram as a formal construct (I have considered, in varying […]
February 1, 2017
Echoes and Mirrors (Innovation in Conversation: Part III)
One of the joys of teaching, and of writing for the Kenyon Review blog, is the two-way street of ideas and information these forums afford. While I hope I’m educating in […]
December 22, 2016
The End of the Line: Terrance Hayes and Formal Innovation
If asked whose formal innovations have most influenced a current generation of younger poets, the first name out of my mouth would be Terrance Hayes. His “Golden Shovel” form is a […]