On Poetry

March 2, 2011

In the Company of Amy Clampitt 2

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Two years ago I spent some time in Lenox, Massachusetts, at a house once owned by the poet Amy Clampitt. I slept in her bed, rifled through her books, gazed out the kitchen window at the tree by which her ashes are buried.

January 25, 2011

Dada Pedagogy: Andrei Codrescu’s The Poetry Lesson 2

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Regardless of how it’s labeled, The Poetry Lesson is a brilliant work.

January 7, 2011

No More Irony: A Review of Monica Youn’s Ignatz 2

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I was suspicious of Ignatz’s subgenre: poetry books that are designedly books rather than collections, their titles linked by a single unifying conceit. The category was proliferating, it seemed to me, cultured by a world of book prizes and writing programs, or encouraged by distinguished precedents and obvious advantages.

July 20, 2010

War Comes Home: Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise 1

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Contemporary war, in America at least, is now defined as much by coming home as it is by shipping out.

June 10, 2010

Machine Gun Sonnets 4

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World War One, when educated and idealistic young men wrote of mustard gas and aerial bombardment using sonnets and couplets.

April 27, 2010

Thrill Screen: Poetry and Performance 4

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Consider that when this video premiered on MTV, I was four years old. “Thriller” broke all kinds of new ground for the way it merged storytelling, music, and filmmaking, but all that was nothing to the absolute crater this video—and Vincent Price’s reading—left on my tiny, brand-new imagination.