December 13, 2018
On Eckes, Harvey and Myles
It sounds like a middling 70’s folk rock act, right? Maybe in some alternate universe it is a middling 70’s folk rock act, but in my own universe it’s been […]
December 7, 2017
American Sonnets (Part VI: Hayes In His Own Words)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part V: Hayes In His Own Words)”] Terrance Hayes’s conversation with Rachel Zucker, discussed in my previous post, is certainly not the only conversation in which […]
September 5, 2017
New Poems by Oliver de la Paz and Danez Smith
Two new poems that have moved me most deeply recently are Oliver de la Paz’s “Autism Screening Questionnaire – Speech and Language Delay” in the July/August 2017 issue of Poetry and […]
April 13, 2017
This marble fact: Jill Alexander Essbaum’s “Easter”
Last year in this same season, I wrote a post titled “You Are Spring,” reflecting on the life, death, and poetry of Patrick Flynn Eckenrode, who, living with severe depression, […]
November 11, 2016
“We need to know how to go about reaching the next days of our lives”
Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” is going around again. W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is circling through social media, as it did after September 11. Why do we turn to poems […]
March 9, 2016
Poetry and Community: Events and Evidence
When we consider what enables a poem to endure, it’s easy to side with immediate fatalism and shoulder-shrugging, or opt for broad-brushed faith in long-term aesthetic exceptionalism and artistic meritocracy, without really considering the everyday […]
February 2, 2016
“And since I’m the one writing it . . .”
After Saturday’s orientation, Monday evening was the first official joint meeting of Writers in Baltimore Schools high school students and Johns Hopkins University undergrads collaborating on the Community-Based Learning course “Poetry & […]
November 20, 2015
Who Only Has at Heart Your Getting Lost: Wandering Into Poetry
Even for those of us who don’t have to be convinced to read poetry in the first place, it can be a challenge to “keep up” with poetry. If you’re reading […]
September 2, 2015
The Daniel Swiftboating of Helen Vendler
The knives are out again for Helen Vendler. In a recent review for The Spectator, Daniel Swift accuses the poetry critic of performing a bloodless “scientific evaluation of literature.” Her […]
December 9, 2012
Short Takes: By the Letter, By the Draft
August Wilson: “Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are […]
August 3, 2010
The Sewanee Writers’ Conference: Dig Yourself
The 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference ended just over a week ago; I’m back in Ann Arbor, having Honda’d my way through Kentucky and Ohio. Still, I have all of these […]