May 31, 2015
Making (and [the Next]) Generation Part II: Educator Interview with Adam Kaplan
My previous post began a series of posts focusing on teaching, writing, and youth. The new anthology Please Excuse This Poem is the catalyst for this investigation, and I shared poems and reflections from […]
May 30, 2015
Poetry and Chess
I was perusing YouTube for new movie trailers, as I do sometimes in between cases at work. Confession: I never intend to go watch the flick unless it’s a new […]
May 30, 2015
Making (and [the Next]) Generation
This March, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, edited by Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick, was published under the imprint of “Viking Books for Young […]
May 15, 2015
Writing In and Speaking Out
Earlier this month, in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the community unrest and outcry that followed in Baltimore, Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS), […]
April 30, 2015
Facing It
Today, though I stumble, as usual, I am “thinking through” my language–considering my word choices in a draft of a poem, in comments on student work, in conversations with other attendees on the steps […]
April 24, 2015
a Chamber – to be Haunted –
“The only way to be honest is to be haunted,” says poet Joseph Lease, closing a panel exploring “Where Art & Activism Meet” on Saturday, April 11th, the final panel […]
April 8, 2015
Trophies
In The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry, Rick Barot, one of the book’s contributors, offers this bit of testimony about his development as a writer: For years, what I cared about […]
April 3, 2015
Technical Difficulty
I’m excited to be blogging for The Kenyon Review, especially at the start of the much-anticipated and oft-maligned National Poetry Month. Personally, I love reading blog posts that serve as […]
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 […]
March 3, 2015
Night Thoughts (I)
Dickinson’s dashes and erratic capitalizations seem unusual or eccentric only to those who are unfamiliar with 19th century letter-writing. Byron’s letters, for example, are punctuated entirely in Dickinsonese, and similarly […]
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 […]
January 8, 2015
A Physiology of Style: Asthma, Proust, Pharoahe Monch
“This asthma became part of his art—if indeed his art did not create it. Proust’s syntax rhythmically and stop by step reproduces his fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, […]