Tag
Poetry
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Two Ways of Disliking Poetry
When I was fourteen, a friend invited me to stay a week with his family on the Outer Banks. What I remember most vividly about that week is a book.
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Without the Poet, There Is Only War
“The victims of History are permanently exiled from home, within and without. The practitioners or memory are also: we live as foreigners, as translators.”
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“Only the Northern Lights”: The Russo-Ukrainian War and Its Poets
These poets unsettle a collective sense of melancholy into a generative force, from which a transformed historical imagination can emerge.
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To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi
“What can be said with language, a human invention, about something as ineffable and ephemeral as love or desire or rage or loneliness or despair, fear of God?”
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Frivolity Is Not Unserious
“When we try to write about trauma, no matter what the trauma we wish to explore, it’s the poet’s job to do their homework.”
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“Things Happen, As They Do in War”: From Chaucer’s Siege of Troy to the Siege of Gaza
“Troilus and Criseyde” is not often regarded as war poetry. But in 2024, it’s impossible not to see the truth at the poem’s core: it’s a work about a city under siege.
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B-Sides: The Poems of John Rollin Ridge, or Yellow Bird (Chees-quat-a-law-ny)
“These were not just celebratory poems praising nature as the genre required, but practical ones recording California’s resources, peoples, and events.”
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Phantoms of Patriarchy: On Ditlevsen & Bachmann
Revival fetishism perpetuates the gendered dynamics of authorship and reception that Tove Ditlevsen and Ingeborg Bachmann spent their lives writing about and against.
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Can Literature Cure Law? Should It?
The two disciplines, law and literature, may converge creatively, part amicably, and go their ways dispensing their respective forms of redress.
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Gaming the Lyric: Poetry in 8-Bit
Some video games can evoke complex emotions, activate a voice, and cultivate a political imagination—like the best poetry.
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Our Siege Is Long
Throughout his life, poet Muin Bseiso narrated the history of Palestinian struggle and criticized Western portrayals of Gaza. Today, Bseiso’s son dodges Israeli bombs to preserve his archives.
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B-Sides: George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy”
If George Eliot was interested in religious coexistence, she was also interested in unbelief.
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“Our Hands”: Reading with DeafBlind Poet John Lee Clark
Clark’s poetry collection questions how those excluded from spoken conversation devise new avenues for transmission.
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Saying Goodbye to Childhood: An Interview with Javier Zamora
“I hope people will see the heartbreak of a little kid having to grow up and say goodbye to his childhood in order to survive.”
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“Maybe it wasn’t a Narrative at All”: Three Poetry Collections
The best poets tend to trouble conventions, including those they find necessary.
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“I Speak Only for Myself”: Anahid Nersessian on Keats, Feminism, and Poetry
“One of the things that is interesting about Keats’ letters to Fanny Brawne is that you can’t infer a damn thing that’s happened between them.”
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Magnificent Wreck: Samuel Taylor Coleridge at 250
How to interpret Coleridge’s voluminous patchwork of triumphs, fragments, stolen snippets, and unrealized plans? Does any larger pattern emerge?
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Failure’s Gifts
Even the most successful authors—like Phillis Wheatley and W. E. B. Du Bois—fail to publish all they’d like. What can that reveal about literature?
