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 […]
August 5, 2016
Ghost Stories, Systems
Between sad, hateful blats from Trump’s trumpet and the usual political dogwhistles came the (largely unheard in national mainstream media) dirges for three (more) Black women killed, in the words […]
February 23, 2016
Audre Lorde
Last Thursday, February 18, was the birthday of Audre Lorde. This semester, I am teaching a course focused on poetry and social justice, so I think about Audre Lorde’s writing […]
May 27, 2014
Ars Prosaica: On Lines and Sentences
When I have a point to make, I write prose; when I have a sound to make, I write verse. This is a distinction based on ends. There is […]
March 4, 2013
Knox Writers’ House: A Conversation with Emily Oliver
If you haven’t visited the Knox Writers’ House—a digital archive of poets and writers reading their poems and prose, as well as the writings of others, recording in the towns […]
January 5, 2013
The Alternate Bard: On Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems
Shakespeare’s narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were dedicated to an aristocrat, and full of the conceits and set-piece sequences and strict stanzas that appealed to […]
February 25, 2012
Poetry, Prose, and Prosetry: Shakespeare’s Hybrid Vigor
Prose took over storytelling (both in narrative and dramatic form) beginning in the 17th century. The prose shift in full-scale narrative commences with Quijote, which is why critics have […]