March 17, 2019
On The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau
In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau. Translated by Paul E. Losensky and Sunil Sharma Penguin Classics India, 2011. 164 pages. The Introduction to this […]
January 6, 2017
Innovation in Conversation: Part I
In thinking about formal innovation in the poetry of Terrance Hayes in my last post, it struck me that, paradoxically, innovation loves company. As a reader, when I encounter formal “newness,” […]
June 6, 2016
The Data Mine of Rap
The Raplyzer is a computer program that automatically analyzes rhymes from rap lyrics and ranks rappers according to their Rhyme Factor. Created by Eric Malmi, a doctoral student in Computer […]
June 30, 2015
Teach This (Part IV)
[Continued from yesterday’s post on teaching Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner.”] It might seem strange to teach the same poem twice in a single semester (particularly two weeks […]
June 29, 2015
Teach This (Part III)
Building off of my posts from June 17 and June 18, today I’m thinking about why I love teaching Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner” and “Night, Death, Mississippi” so much. For […]
May 13, 2012
The Reconquest of the Long Form
There are, by my count, only two things that can save a long poem in English. Heterogeneity (Eliot and Pound; and those polyphonic, formally quite various sustained dramatic poems of […]
May 2, 2012
On Conceptual Poetry
No Conceptualist Poet has yet come up with a concept as mind-bogglingly difficult as mine: Create a poetry that exploits existing grammatical and syntactical paradigms (sometimes as deceptively simple […]
January 2, 2012
The Art that Bears Repeating
Entertaining toddlers is easy. It’s the same damned thing over and over again. Within that framework of repetition, and the expectation it generates and satisfies, you can vary things how […]