Author Archive
The Reanimating Power of Epistolary Poetry
Poetry is the process of happening, its reanimating force something experienced each time a poem is read in our heads, aloud, privately, or to others. The best poems—Rachel Mennies’s and Sumita Chakraborty’s poems—are made with such specificity, such unmistakable architecture, that hearing them is this experience, this happening.
Robots Like a Greek Chorus
Poets are grappling with their anxieties over the future of artificial intelligence; with their awe at technological innovation; with their fumbling through the knowledge that, in pockets and backpacks, one carries with them a computer’s long-term memory—infallible and encyclopedic, unlike ours.
Long Poems, Long Sentences
After almost fifty years of his poetry, Muldoon has prepared his readers for a journey not through our own predictable circles—these syntactical maps rule out one’s own choice between right or left—but to arrive somewhere comfortably unexpected.
The Garbage of Our Time
A. R. Ammons's 1993 book-length poem, a meditation on excess and waste as the defining trait of our species, anticipated the worst conversations one wishes were avoidable: climate change and a non-hyperbolic global destruction.