March 14, 2019
The Art of Attending to Our Surroundings: Self-Portrait with Dogwood by Christopher Merrill
Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and […]
February 5, 2016
The Sultan of Nonsense
Last week, on this blog, I asked a question that I didn’t try to answer: “Where is the great nonsense of our time?” Might it be found in the lines […]
December 31, 2015
Old Year/New Year: Poems
Woody Guthrie: “Woody Guthrie’s 1943 “New Years Rulin’s.” Found in one of his journals dated January 1st, 1943.” — woodieguthrie.org * Naomi Shihab Nye: Burning the Old Year Letters swallow […]
November 30, 2015
Thanks and Thanksgiving and Thank you
Thanksgiving was last Thursday, and giving thanks always makes me think of W. S. Merwin’s “Thanks”: Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on […]
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 […]
June 28, 2013
What Makes Contemporary American Poetry So Good
One of the most wonderful things about being a writer in contemporary America—besides the unprecendented ease of access to books—is our multiplicity of traditions. In the past, in smaller, more homogenous […]
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 […]
January 5, 2012
Mix Tape: The New Year (“So this is the new year, and I don’t feel any different”)
Helen Vendler goes after The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove. “Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry […]