October 18, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – October
In the beginning was the Word, I read again, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Whatever your theology, that’s a sublime lede. We call this […]
August 31, 2019
“The Prairie-Grass Dividing,” the Beer
The second in a series of seven Walt Whitman beer reviews: “The Distillation Would Intoxicate Me Also” There’s democracy in beer drinking, or so Americans like to believe. When the punditocracy […]
June 5, 2019
“Song of Myself,” the Beer
“Sobriety,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1842, is “that virtue which every mother and father prays nightly” will reside “in the character of their sons.” Tell that to Bell’s Brewery, which […]
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 […]
July 26, 2017
NSFW: On “Hysterical Literature,” Leaves of Grass, and the Sexy Reading Movement
Somewhere in the foggy realm between performance art and porno, on a YouTube channel where a poem drives up page views, a woman reads aloud from a paperback book. She […]
June 21, 2017
“There is that in me”: On Selves
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) – Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” To say that I’ve been a “private” blogger […]
January 15, 2017
An Open Letter from the Only Poet on the Professor Watchlist
Dear Charlie Kirk, Founder of Turning Point USA: It’s not every day that an American poet can address someone who thinks he is dangerous. For that alone I should thank […]
March 26, 2015
Whitman Dies, as My Daughter Would Say, “For Real Life”
“I know I am deathless,” Whitman wrote, in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. “I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, I know […]