Section
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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Black Poetry after Beyoncé
How do black feminist artists negotiate their own work in the wake of commercial success beyond contemporary poetry’s wildest dreams?
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“I Can’t Make You See What I See”: Talking with Cyree Jarelle Johnson and Jesse Rice-Evans
“Writing about lupus is like writing about ghosts. What do you say about something featureless?” [none-for-homepage]
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Reading Against the Line: Translation, Fascism, Erasure
I’m just wary of the tendency to glorify revolutionary violence and masculinity.
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Helen of West Hollywood
It hardly seems necessary to offer a spoiler alert for news that is well over two millennia old. But some news is so surprising, so contrary to everything we thought we knew, that time can do little …
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The Lyric Me, Too
“The” is a suspect word. It’s small and ubiquitous, but there’s something presumptuous about it. It aggrandizes and abstracts. Unlike “this” and “that,” which also indicate specificity (“this word,” “that man”), “the” indicates primacy and universality (“the word,” “the man”). As Wallace Stevens famously declares in “The Man on the Dump,” “Where was it one…
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Resistance without Rhetoric
There’s a common belief that moments of public agony are good for poetry. Political turmoil, so this wishful thinking goes, galvanizes an otherwise private art and …
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What If Keats Had Lived?
What if John Keats—the brilliant Romantic poet, whose revolutionary lyrics blended classical myth and sensuous imagery—hadn’t died at age 25? The Warm South, a new novel by Paul Kerschen, reimagines …
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Machines Like Me, But They Love You
In almost any book about artificial life, there comes a moment when the humans, like Victor Frankenstein, are obliged to confront the full reality of what they’ve …
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Atlantic Got Your Tongue
Safia Elhillo’s poetry comes to us exactly when we need it, in the era of the travel ban and the border wall. The richness of feeling and formal inventiveness of her work open up an alternative universe from the tweet-shouting of anti-immigrant rhetoric today. Her first collection, The January Children, offers a lyrical vision of…
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Poetry in Times of Crisis
Even on a college campus, you rarely spot a poem out in the open. When you do, it’s often a sign that something terrible has happened. In the days after the 2016 presidential election, I came across more than one printout of the W. H. Auden poem “September 1, 1939” posted on office doors and…
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Boss Poet
Little has changed since Bruce Springsteen explained the origin of his song “Thunder Road” to a seething crowd at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 19, 1978. “There was this Robert Mitchum movie, and it was about these moonshine runners down south,” he said, running a hand through his hair and leaning…
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A Storm of Words
Imagine a world where the hottest degree was an MPA, a Masters in Poetry Administration. Where a single poem could send global financial markets into a spin, where poets were the envy of all, and instead of shopping for material objects people ran out to buy poems to hang on the walls of their parlours. This…
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Reduction and Relief
In 2015, the conceptual writing movement came under fire in a very public way. Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, two of conceptual writing’s most prominent figures, drew sharp criticism from the larger poetic community—and later, major media outlets—for producing work that was icky and insensitive at best, downright racist at worst. Many writers and groups…
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The Postindustrial Pastoral
Adrienne Su’s accomplished new book of poems Living Quarters invites meditation on the material specificities of too-readily-typecast locales. Recalibrating the geographical and cultural tropes of American nature writing, Living Quarters offers readers a portrait of rural modernity1 rather than pastoral nostalgia—a portrait that unsettles the divisions of agricultural versus industrial and provincial versus cosmopolitan that…
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Drone Poems
The protests of Hong Kong’s 2014 “Umbrella Revolution” were marked in early days by the intermittent appearance of a helicopter drone flying high above the crowds, looking rather like a pizza box with propellers. I heard a moment’s nervous murmuring from the crowd each time it went up. But the drone’s LEDs were swirling red…
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Blue Peter: On Peter Gizzi
Brice Marden used beeswax to kill the reflective luster of his triptych color panels. Ad Reinhardt leeched the gloss out of his chromatic blacks. Jasper Johns accreted his white flags with matte paper and cotton. Such works defend the big Nothing of minimalist experimentation with the eloquence of rich monochromes that are apparently porous, surfaces…
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Wait Cursor
A girl, bundled against the cold, holds up her hand as though requesting pause or distance—freeze, stop, stay back. Perfectly centered in the space of her bright palm is a Mac loading wheel frozen in mid-spin, its moon-burst rays making a value scale of the photograph’s various grays. Roland Barthes had a phrase—“prophecy in reverse”—for…
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Virtual Roundtable on The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
First published in 1965, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a reference volume for poetry enthusiasts and literary scholars alike. Last year, a significantly revised fourth edition appeared, covering 110 nations, regions, and languages, and with 250 new entries on subjects ranging from “boustrophedon” (bidirectional texts) to “hip-hop poetry” and “anthem, national.” Public…
