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 […]
May 7, 2014
Two Silver Threads Poets
Earlier this week, I posted my interview with composer Jacob Cooper about his new album Silver Threads, a song cycle that features Cooper’s collaboration with several poets in a luminous […]
June 1, 2012
A Craft Note On the Duet (part 4) and On the Elegy (part 2)
Several several weeks ago now, Tarfia Faizullah and I exchanged notes on the elegy in what was billed as the first part of a multi-part craft note on the elegy. […]
April 20, 2012
Craft Note: Duet—Part Two (Ending With A Post By Tarfia Faizullah Ending With A Line By Vallejo)
The poem that begins with a borrowed line begins spending its inheritance right away. It feels free, cavalier, perhaps even prodigal at times. It seems to thrive on its own […]
March 21, 2012
Craft Note: The Elegy (part one)
[Blogger’s note: This post is part of a series of craft notes that look forward to the work Tarfia Faizullah and I will be doing at the Kenyon Review Writers […]
March 6, 2012
A Craft Note on The Craft Note
I spent this past weekend at the annual AWP Conference in Chicago, alternately overstimulated by the crowd in the bookfair and by the conversations in and around the panels. I […]