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 […]
September 7, 2017
Remembering John Ashbery’s Time and Space
Vladimir Nabokov’s confession in Speak, Memory (1951) that he does not believe in time might have been more shocking if it had come earlier in literary history; by the modernist […]
August 14, 2017
My Conservative Past
Maybe I was reading too much T. S. Eliot. Maybe it was the gnawing sense of living in a world out of control—but when has the world ever been 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 […]
February 7, 2017
On Poetry and Politics
Despite American poetry’s grand political past, such as Whitman’s hymns to democracy and human variety, and its ongoing achievements, some strains of American critical thought suffer from isolationism, at least […]
February 7, 2017
Notes on BANANA PALACE or Fourteen Ways of Looking at Dana Levin
1. Toward the end of Dana Levin’s remarkable book of poems Banana Palace, a poem entitled “At the End of My Hours” closes its first section like this: . . . […]
May 5, 2016
Why I’m Still Not Convinced that Meter is Physiological
I sparked a small feud last month when I wrote in this blog that “Iambic Pentameter Has Nothing to Do with Your Heart.” My essay took issue with a “pulse […]
February 8, 2016
Station to Station: On David Bowie and Skateboarding
As has been previously noted, the last account David Bowie felt the need to follow on Twitter was God’s. This, then, seems apt. Since his unexpected death of cancer on […]
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 […]
November 23, 2014
Pitching and Defense
In today’s New York Times Book Review, Adam Kirsch and Leslie Jamison address a familiar question: “How has the social role of poetry changed since Shelley?” (This question is usually […]
January 19, 2014
Anne Sexton and Poetic Atavism
Rereading the Collected Poems of Anne Sexton, she seems to me to have become, over her career, the least “Confessional” of the poets given that label. Apparently she suffered […]
October 29, 2013
The Twenty-Year Rule
Just as there is a sharp division between a 19th century Yeats (the “Celtic Twilight” material) and a deliberately developed, 20th century Yeats (the “Byzantine” Yeats of the more […]