This is a blog about poetics, for both poets and non-poets. It takes its name from Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man on the Dump,” which ends with a question and an answer: “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.” THEthe is a forum for ideas on poetry and the poetic aspects of fiction, non-fiction, music, visual art, film, and “the things / That are on the dump (azaleas and so on) / And those that will be (azaleas and so on).” Our contributors are writers, readers, artists, critics and so on. Our readers are writers, readers, artists, critics and so on. All are people on the dump, where “one sits and beats and old tin can, lard pail. / One beats and beats for that which one believes. / That’s what one wants to get near.” We hope that THEthe will help us all get a little closer.
For those who are new to the blog, check out some of these posts to get a feel for our blog:
1. Bianca Stone’s comic “Poem Thing”
2. Ben Fama on Reciting Your Own Poems from Memory
3. Adam Fitzgerald Gathers Intelligent Opinion on Keat’s “Well-Wrought Urn”
4. Lonely Christopher Reviews Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life
5. Mary Karr and Chris Robingon in the Inaugural Episode of Poetry Fix
6. Brooks Lampe Re-imagines Surrealism
7. Genevieve Burger-Weiser Reviews Michael Klein’s then, we were still living
8. Brian Chappell Talks about Empathy, Cultural Dialogue, and Dead White Men
9. Micah Towery Analyzes How Tu Fu Works
10. Joe Weil Talks about a Different Kind of Workshop
11. Ben Pease interviews Solmaz Sharif on the Scattered Rhymes podcast
12. Gene Tanta explains Why Collaboration Matters