October 2, 2019
A Record of What It Meant: An Interview with Carl Phillips, Author of The Art of Daring and Coin of the Realm
This post is the twelfth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
September 7, 2019
To Allow for Wonder: An Interview with Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko, Authors of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology
This post is the tenth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
July 5, 2019
Craft Is Not Monolithic: An Interview with Luisa A. Igloria and Amanda Galvan Huynh, Editors of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making
Earlier this year, I embarked on one of the single most important endeavors of my literary career thus far: an interview series with the authors and editors of craft books. […]
May 10, 2019
The Music of Echo in Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”
1901 illustration to the poem by W. E. F. Britten Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters” responds to the following section from Homer’s The Odyssey: “I was driven from there by […]
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 […]
May 26, 2015
Soundings: Poetry and Process
Sounding: the action or process of measuring the depth of the sea or other body of water. Sounding: information or evidence ascertained as a preliminary step before deciding on a […]
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 […]
September 22, 2012
Shakespeare’s body, Shakespeare’s ghost: erasure, canonicity, and the apophatic self
I’ll begin with a claim: that every text produces in its writer a sense of the self becoming unglued—that one creates, or expunges, meaning in the form of a literary […]