April 7, 2018
Putting Together Your First Poetry Book
So you’ve decided you’re ready to take your onslaught of poems and form them into your very first poetry book. This is an exciting time, and I hope I can […]
March 28, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XVIII: From the French for…)
[Continued from: “American Sonnets (Part XVII: An American Sonnet By Any Other Name)”] I stepped out of America for a moment in mentioning Rimbaud – as David Lehman did – […]
February 28, 2018
Re-Reading Theodore Roethke
Animism, or the belief that nature has a soul, only provides a partial way in to Roethke’s poetry. He doesn’t merely believe in the existence of a soul in nature; […]
February 16, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XV: Some Sonnets)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XIV: Stein’s Sonnet)”] I’m going by memory and intuition here in tracing some kind of history of the formally subversive American sonnet – I hope […]
February 14, 2018
On Being an “Annoying Poet Girl” and “Art Monster”
As you might imagine, there was a comical symmetry when I, an often irritating female poet, watched the movie Adult World about . . . an often irritating female poet. […]
February 12, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XIV: Stein’s Sonnet)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XIII: The Hinges)”] In my last post, I thought a bit about how Gertrude Stein first opened up (or rather, unhinged) some of the doors […]
January 27, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XII: Precursors)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XI: Insistence)”] Terrance Hayes ended a 2006 post for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, by writing that “it is possible to value two very different things at […]
January 24, 2018
Dispatches From the World of Cuban Poetry
Culled from countless books, magazines, and anthologies, the January/February KR issue pays special tribute to the work of Cuban Generation Zero, or Generación Cero, poets, born post-1970 and publishing post-2000. […]
January 3, 2018
Thinking of Wallace Stevens in Winter
A snowy morning seems the perfect time to revisit two Wallace Stevens winter-snow-philosophy poems that have lived inside me since I first read them years ago, “Thirteen Ways of Looking […]
December 23, 2017
American Sonnets (Part IX: Concept and Impact)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part VIII: A Tale of Two Sonnets)”] In my last post, I returned to sonnets (traditional and conceptual) in Terrance Hayes’s first two books of poems, Muscular […]
December 22, 2017
Banned Words and Erasure Poetry
Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, among many others, has called the Trump administration’s forbidding the CDC’s use of certain words and terms (transgender, diversity, fetus, vulnerable, entitlement, evidence-based, and science-based) Orwellian, in reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel […]
December 11, 2017
The Influence of Zora Neale Hurston’s Films on Beyoncé’s Lemonade
I re-watched Lemonade last night. From the moment Beyoncé’s “Visual Album” Lemonade exploded onto the aesthetic scene, everyone has been scrambling to trace its formidable roots. In mapping out Lemonade’s visual […]