Author Archive

Consciousness and the Creative Impulse

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
The language of literature has an existential condition. Poetic consciousness is a term that, generally, speaks to the ability that language has when employed with artistic intention, to alter perception, to heighten it.

The Sympathizer and the National Imagination

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer re-situates history. 3 million Vietnamese died, and 58,000 American soldiers. A generation later, Nguyen has given this history an authentic voice—a voice that has been brushed aside, hidden from discourse, from textbooks, from individuals whose identities contain it.

Negotiating Religiosity in Tomaz Salamun’s “Ships”

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
I was driving the first time I heard Tomaz Salamun’s poem “Ships” on Poetry off the Shelf, the Poetry Foundation’s podcast. I didn’t have the chance to glance at the poem’s first line, “I’m religious,” and decide whether or not to read it.

Whitman and Dickinson and the Civil War

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Contemporary American poetry was born in the context of the Civil War, the war that claimed more Americans than ever before or since. Whitman and Dickinson, two of America’s seminal poets, were alive and writing poetry during the Civil War.

Perfectly Aligned: Inger Christensen’s Poetry Through Her American Translator Susanna Nied

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Though Christensen’s work has been well-loved in Europe since the publications of her first two collections of poetry, in Danish, her poetry did not reach American audiences until alphabet, translated by Susanna Nied and published by New Directions in 2001.

A Word for Blue

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Across languages, cultures, and time, blue is humanity’s most novel color.  As far back as we can track human words for colors and their appearance in art and artifact, black and white were first, then red, yellow, and green.

Poetry, Science, Politics, and Birds

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
In watching birds, I understand Adrienne Rich’s idea of triangulation through poetry, science, and politics. Someone thousands of miles across the globe must also value, give voice to, and protect the homes of my most familiar backyard birds.

Why Poetry Is Difficult

Author: | Categories: Writing No comments
Because there is language. Humanoids happened, then Homo sapiens happened, and somewhere down the line, we started to talk. Why? Because pictures weren’t enough. Because pictures, dazzling as they were (and still are), are a little less portable, less mutable to the nuances of our shifting perceptions.

On Topophilia and a Complicated Love of Jim Harrison’s Fiction

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
Topophilia, coined by W.H. Auden in 1947, means the love of place; a straightforward word to describe thoughts and feelings I have with regularity.

Somewhere Else: One Woman and Her Car

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
About two years ago, I arranged for a one-way ride to York, Maine, to buy a 2004 Toyota Matrix that I found on Craigslist. While the owner counted the cash, he gave me a brief history of my new car.