January 27, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XII: Precursors)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XI: Insistence)”] Terrance Hayes ended a 2006 post for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, by writing that “it is possible to value two very different things at […]
January 20, 2018
Interview with Andrew Seguin
Combining the poetic, photographic and historic, Andrew Seguin’s collection The Room In Which I Work (winner of the 2015 Omnidawn Open Book Contest) is immersive on a variety of different […]
January 3, 2018
Thinking of Wallace Stevens in Winter
A snowy morning seems the perfect time to revisit two Wallace Stevens winter-snow-philosophy poems that have lived inside me since I first read them years ago, “Thirteen Ways of Looking […]
March 24, 2016
“Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake”: On Walking and Writing
Wallace Stevens makes an assertion in the opening stanza of the seventh section of his poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” that has always stuck with me. It reads, plainly: […]
November 29, 2015
“Merely in living as and where we live”: Part II
Last week, on a bright, blustery Baltimore morning, Joseph Harrison rang the doorbell at 32 W 25th Street, and we entered Royal Books. Specializing in first editions, the store is a book […]
November 27, 2015
“Merely in living as and where we live”: Part I
In my previous post, I imagined the thrill of a first encounter with Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” which appeared for the first time in Poetry 100 years ago this month, November 1915. […]
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 […]
February 23, 2015
Rotten, Rotten, Rotten
We’re seven weeks into the winter semester—and my students have written some terrible poems. It’s OK; I’ve asked them to. We’ve been reading W. D. Snodgrass’s De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems […]
November 28, 2013
More Life
One of my daughters turns ten today. I’m not sure how much we’ll celebrate, seeing that it’s also Thanksgiving and the first day of Chanukah. Still, ten feels important—it’s the […]
August 20, 2013
Virtues of Madness and Vices of Honey: An Interview with Mary Ruefle
[This interview was preceded by an introduction; you can read that here.] Last year, Ruefle and I corresponded via mail; our correspondence is printed below. You can find out more […]
August 16, 2013
The Anthology Blues, or, A Very Modest Proposal
It’s like the long-delayed return of a plague we were sure had taken its last victims: the debate over the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry has risen, zombie-like. Just […]
January 18, 2012
Mind of Winter
If anyone has one, a mind of winter, it’s Tomas Tranströmer. I’ve been thinking about his poems lately, how each seems to place the reader in a crystalline picture frame […]