December 10, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – December
What makes poetry poetry? Ask that question of a dozen poets, scholars, or readers and you’ll get as many different answers, maybe more. Some won’t be much help: “Poetry is […]
October 10, 2018
William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson”
If Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s project in the Cantos and The Waste Land is, in Patersonian terms, to pull “the disparate together to clarify and compress,” then Williams’s project […]
December 5, 2017
American Sonnets (Part V: Hayes in His Own Words)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part IV: As American As…)”] Hayes himself confirms some of the contextualizing ground I’ve covered in the past few posts in talking about his new American Sonnet […]
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 […]
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 […]
September 23, 2013
Futurism Revisited: An Interview with Marjorie Perloff, Part I
[This interview, which will be published in parts, was preceded by an introduction; you can read that here.] The Kenyon Review: I was interested to learn that F. T. Marinetti was […]
February 28, 2012
Of ideogrammar
Just the other day a professor and mentor of mine gave me a copy of Volume III of the late Larry Eigner’s recently-released Collected Poems. What demarcates this collection most […]