She Has Smoothed Her Pants to No End (from Debbie: An Epic) This is the light Debbie steps into. Her toffeed flanks roll with greatness and sustenance in their sockets…
Category: How Poems Work
A few months ago, a friend’s father challenged me to defend poetry as a product in the marketplace — the demand left me sputtering about art, the relative insignificance of…
I’ve heard several recordings of Brooks reading “We Real Cool” over the years. Yesterday, in class, I played her again. This after having a student read the poem out loud.…
Like many, I enjoy contemplative, epiphany-seeking poetry. Poetry whose contents and formal properties collude to make art and psychological reality appear as one. A lovely fiction! And I duly appreciate…
Fixing a Real Phantom Limb with a special glove fits real life to a private message the abominable pixels that help people with snow. a lifetime watch battery for allowance…
NO ONE CARES MUCH WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU when Serbs get mad, they talk about a small town like Grace Stop laughing; I’m serious Grace is all I can afford…
Frederick Douglass When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth; when it belongs at last to…
Some said they heard the pegs squeaking in the holes Of the lyre as if the god were setting a text To the music of wooden wheels On a stridulous…
How Poems Work: “Subjecthood and the Light Verb” by Donato Manciniby a. rawlings It is Tuesday afternoon in August. Like the past few Tuesdays, I visit with Holden F. Levack,…
from The Tapeworm Foundry by Darren Wershler-Henry House of Anansi, 2000 —————– andor gather all the equestrian statues from the parks and squares of the world and then place these…
Dawn’s Athlete: Washed Talent? Satan Held Wet Death, Lent Saw, Hated Lawn Set, Stew, And Lathe (Lead the Wants/The Waste Land) Thanks to Elizabeth Bachinsky for her generous and thoughtful…
The Nose To, the Tens No, the Not Ens, the Sent On, the S o n n e t “…she is very capricious; one cannot summon or foresee her; she…