March 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – March
“Rhymes can make sense of the world in a way that regular speech can’t.” Hip hop mogul Jay-Z (Sean Carter) says it better than I can. It’s no coincidence that […]
February 11, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – February
It’s happening again. Even as we speak, elsewhere—in a college dorm, maybe, or some recess of the internet—a word is changing. Just as “cool” evolved in African-American jazz circles of the […]
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 […]
December 7, 2015
An Issue of Blood
This Thursday is Emily Dickinson’s 185th birthday; she was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she died in 1886. In 1885, she wrote to Mabel Loomis Todd, who […]
May 19, 2015
Basic Instructions for Being Human
These days, I’m thinking much about my love for liberal education and the ways in which it continues to be relevant in the world of screens, as the virtual begins […]
October 31, 2014
Boo
It’s Halloween; let’s light the cauldron. Shakespeare’s weird sisters, when making their hell-broth, tossed in “Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog”—and, […]
January 4, 2014
Esoteric and Exoteric: On Dickinson and Shakespeare
When I go back into my own archives—old floppy disks, ancient dot-matrix printouts off an Apple II GS—I find that my earliest poetry (written in my mid-teens) falls into two […]
November 9, 2013
With or Without You: Government Censorship and Literary Creativity
Good Queen Bess, absolute monarch during the great flowering of English drama, had a hair-trigger policy on censorship. No writer was allowed to criticize the Queen or her policy on […]
May 23, 2013
The Regression to the Primitive
Northrop Frye, discussing the arc of Shakespeare’s plays, says something very profound about Shakespeare’s late “Romances,” like A Winter’s Tale and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. …as a dramatist, […]
January 7, 2013
Shakespeare’s Mystical Rhyme: On “The Phoenix and the Turtle”
For a writer frequently claimed to represent or comprehend all of human experience, there is remarkably little theology, mysticism, or overt religiosity in Shakespeare. We have his audience to thank […]
January 5, 2013
The Alternate Bard: On Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems
Shakespeare’s narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were dedicated to an aristocrat, and full of the conceits and set-piece sequences and strict stanzas that appealed to […]
December 17, 2012
Why Ashbery is So Dull
Those who dislike John Ashbery’s poetry often complain that they “don’t understand it.” As any Ashbery fan will explain, while secretly thinking you a retrogressive muggle, there is nothing to […]