“Getting Stabbed Kinda Takes the Fight Out of Ya” by David Kirby
This month’s essay on voice by David Kirby emanates the confidence and tone of an accomplished poet who is also a master teacher. Astutely aware of the collusion that occurs between sight and sound in effective “voice,” Kirby cites one poignant example after another of the audible magic he calls “direct speech”— speech he claims that “keeps talking” for reasons
Essay on the Prose Poem by Charles Simic
I’m grateful to Peter Johnson for bringing Charles Simic’s brilliant, unpublished “Essay on the Prose Poem” to my attention. Although Simic wrote this essay ten years ago, twenty one years after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of prose poems titled The World Does Not End, it reads as freshly today as it did in 2010. Rife with
Suspense, Suspension, and the Sublime in the Poetry of Robert Frost
Suspense, Suspension, and the Sublime in the Poetry of Robert Frost Robert Frost was a sublime poet who struck terror in both himself and his readers. Gifted with a prodigious capacity for what John Keats called “negative capability,” that is, the ability to exist “in uncertainty, Mystery, doubt”—and I would add suspense—“without any irritable reaching after fact and
The Reliable Stream: On A.R. Ammons’s The Complete Poems, V. 1 & 2, W.W. Norton 2017 by T.R. Hummer
This essay introduces new readers of Ammons’ work to the metaphysical courage of his ceaseless, restless poems, while also providing the first comprehensive overview of his Complete Poems from both a biographical and critical perspective. – Chard deNiord The Reliable Stream: On A.R. Ammons’s The Complete Poems, V. 1 & 2, W.W. Norton 2017 Human forms, as well as other
