Author Archive
The Poet’s Manifesto: Three Ars Poeticas
If there is an equivalent of the artist’s statement in poetry, it’s the ars poetica. Latin for “the art of poetry,” the ars poetica shows up as early as Horace, in 19 BC, and most poets since, it seems, have written at least one.
Memory and Metaphor in Mai Der Vang’s Afterland
Many of us who love poetry think of metaphor as being somewhere in its DNA. Without metaphors, somehow, it seems, poetry would not be itself.
Learning to Love the Long Poem
I’ve been wired since girlhood, by factors ranging from my Catholic upbringing to low self-esteem, to shrink, to make myself smaller, to avoid bringing attention to myself. Perhaps my comfort with small poems has underpinnings I should interrogate.
The Meeting of Spiritual Forces in Louise Erdrich’s Poetry
While Louise Erdrich’s fiction investigates the devastating impact that Catholic missionaries had on traditional Ojibwe practices, her poetry collection, Baptism of Desire, investigates a soul that exists in the hybrid space where the two spiritual forces meet.
Ugliness in Natalie Shapero’s Hard Child
Whatever the case, it’s certainly true that for most of my reading life, it never occurred to me that poetry could be anything other than beautiful.
Mary Jo Bang’s Modern Inferno
Mary Jo Bang’s raucous translation of Inferno, published in 2013, tries to bring us as close as she can to the intrigue of Florence in the 14th century.
Kissing Walt Whitman
I saw all the things we consider “Whitmanesque”: the energy, the exuberance, the empathy. And one thing that my mother’s serene portrait had not prepared me for—the eroticism.
Expecting the Fish of Anguish: For the Love of the Non Sequitur
Perhaps in times like these, when the work of making sense of the world around us gets harder, we need poetry that points toward that difficulty—and that makes that work worthwhile.
Star Stuff: Poets on Space
Science relies on metaphors. The work that metaphors do, after all, is to either make the familiar strange, or to make the strange familiar. Science is full of strangenesses, difficult for most of us to grasp unless we have something more quotidian to compare it to. Space, in particular,
Black Voices on the Civil War
Charlottesville has me thinking about poems of the Civil War that center black experiences. Poems from the Civil War canon are usually heavy on Whitman, Dickinson, or folk songs. The following three texts should satisfy anyone who wants to read beyond “O Captain, My Captain.”