Marc Scroggins Why Swinburne? (An Open Letter)
Why Swinburne? (An Open Letter) Dear B——, The other night at the bar, when I had just gotten in from the street and we had barely started the first round, you asked, “Why Swinburne?” The long version of that question might go something like this: “You’re a poet who looks to J. H. Prynne and Susan Howe as lodestars; you
Alexander Dickow: Poetry, Sentimentality, and the Laugh Track Compulsion
Poetry, Sentimentality, and the Laugh Track Compulsion The Anglo-Saxon world – many would say mercifully – never brought forth anything quite like Alphonse de Lamartine. Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques of 1820, a bestseller well beyond anything today’s poets could ever dream of, ostensibly typifies French Romanticism. Virgil Nemoianu has convincingly argued that French Romanticism bears more resemblance to the aesthetically
Robert Archambeau: The Poem in White Space
The Poem in White Space White space comes first, for the poet and the reader. I don’t mean anything as interesting as the idea that poetry exists primarily in the space of whiteness, conceived as a racial identity, as a field dominated (at least in these United States) by white people, white norms, the white past, and white structures
Amish Trivedi: Taylor Swift is a Barbarian or: Stephanie Burt’s Defense of Poetry
Taylor Swift is a Barbarian, or: Stephanie Burt’s Defense of Poetry In November 2017, Cosmopolitan published an interview with Stephanie Burt in which Burt critiqued poems Taylor Swift had included in “magazines” packaged with her latest album, Reputation. In the interview, Burt draws a line between the work Swift does in writing poems and the work that professional poets
T.R. Hummer: The Poet Retires
intr. Of an army, troops, etc.: to fall back or give ground, esp. when confronted by a superior force; to retreat. As a poet, I’ve been a lot of people. I don’t mean that I have written from the perspective of various personae or characters, or even of “heteronyms” in Fernando Pessoa’s sense. I mean that, as a poet, I
Mario Murgia: Gerard Manley Hopkins in Spanish?
What happens, then, when such a unique type of language is transplanted into a completely different linguistic code? In other words, how does the poetry of Hopkins manage to take flight—as vigorously as it does in its “original”—in other languages like, say, Spanish? * In the sonnet “Let me be to Thee as a circling bird …,” Gerard Manley Hopkins
Sally Connoly: Transatlantic Poetics: An Autobiography
Transatlanticism is a rather quaint notion. Outmoded even. the transatlantic traffic between the UK and American that defined twentieth century poetics – the figures of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden straddling the Atlantic like some sort of twin Colossus of Rhodes– has, quite rightly, given way to a twenty-first century transnationalism. The approach allows for a far more
David Wojahn: AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (Part 2)
AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (Part 2) Let me now talk about what happens in one of my letters to students, beyond the anecdotes and exchanges of pleasantries. Typically, a letter first addresses questions students may have posed in their own letters, questions ranging from nuts and bolts stuff (“Could you please talk to me about
David Wojahn: AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (Part 1)
AT THAT URGE FOR MORE LIFE: ADVENTURES IN LO-REZ (PART ONE) Let me start with a poem by the late Galway Kinnell, a figure much revered among readers of contemporary poetry, although he was a decidedly uneven writer. Kinnell is generally associated with the so-called Deep Image School, whose best known figures are
Michael Gregory Stephens: Angels on the Avenue: The Lower East Side When Poetry Was the World
Angels on Second Avenue: The Lower East Side When Poetry Was the World At the start of the 1960s, the Lower East Side transformed itself—from a Jewish ghetto that was still peopled with immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe—into the East Village, a neighborhood of jazzmen, hipsters, alternative poets, ranting public intellectuals, drug addicts and winos and dropouts, students
Kathy Lou Schultz: Teaching African-American Poetry in the Age of Trump
Teaching African American Poetry in the Age of Trump Poetry can’t change the world. The world where we witness horrors from the dismissal of every child’s right to receive a quality education and live in a safe environment, to white racists toting semi-automatic weapons and the Nazi flag through the streets. The world where we wait to see what
Emily Grosholz: Do I write as a Woman Poet, or as a Poet who is a Woman?
Do I Write as a Woman Poet, or a Poet who is a Woman? When I was a child, I thought of poetry as one of the common idioms of life. My mother’s father wrote sonnets, and she and her sisters wrote occasional verse for various occasions; my father’s grandmother’s father published a book of poetry, and my father edited
