April 11, 2019
“This thing I use to stay alive” – An Interview with Poet Husnaa Hashim
Husnaa Hashim is the author of Honey Sequence published by The Head & The Hand, a nonprofit, independent publishing company and writers’ workshop based in Philadelphia. She was the 2017-2018 Youth […]
April 2, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – April
Relax. This is not a column about iambic pentameter. This is a column about the secret history of the English language. But the story of English happens to be the story […]
March 30, 2019
Review: Kural by Tiruvalluvar
Tiruvalluvar. Kural. Translated and edited with an Introduction by P. S. Sundaram. Penguin Classics India, 1990. 168 pages. The Kural generally goes by the title Tirukural, where the “Tiru” […]
March 18, 2019
Making the Familiar Strange: A Conversation With Wendy Chin-Tanner
Wendy Chin-Tanner has published two poetry books with Sibling Rivalry Press, Turn (2014), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards, and Anyone Will Tell You (April 2019). She […]
March 12, 2019
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
In Idylls of the King, Alfred, Lord Tennyson strives to bring the vitality of life to the legend of King Arthur. He seeks to convey a story so ancient it has […]
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 28, 2019
Both Genres Depend on High Stakes: A Conversation with Erica Wright on Poetry and Crime Fiction
Erica Wright writes both poetry and crime fiction. Wright’s first crime novel was one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books for Summer 2014, and her most recent work of […]
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 […]
December 10, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – December
What makes poetry poetry? Ask that question of a dozen poets, scholars, or readers and you’ll get as many different answers, maybe more. Some won’t be much help: “Poetry is […]
November 30, 2018
What I Learned About Teaching College From Being a Parent of Young Kids and Vice Versa
When I got the email asking preschool parents to lead an activity with their kids, I started preparing a poetry writing exercise. I could tell the teachers were dubious as […]
November 7, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – November
“I never got poetry,” someone says to me again. And I sigh. Because I never got it either—at least, not until I learned to stop worrying about “getting it.” In […]