From the category archives:

Academia

More Construction Notes

by migration_test October 14, 2010 Academia

Just a few things to notice about the site redesign. 1. You can now login and comment with your Twitter, Facebook, Open ID, Yahoo, or many other accounts. In the process of this changeover, the old comments have disappeared. Fear not! They are not lost. We’re just in the process of importing them, and barring [...]

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What’s Your Style Book of Choice?

by Micah Towery October 8, 2010 Academia

I’m sure many of you read Stanley Fish’s articles on the topic ? from a year or so ago. I came from the “great tradition” tradition, the Mortimer J. Adler mindset of reading all the great books in the Western canon. I also got my dose of composition advice, much of coming from the slightly [...]

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Is Democracy Incompatible with the Humanities?

by Micah Towery October 1, 2010 Academia

In a recent blog post, and takes George Philip, president of SUNY-Albany, to task for axing the French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theater programs. Fish claims it is the job of presidents and chancellors to proclaim the value of liberal arts education loudly and often and at least try to make the powers that be [...]

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Towards a Different Kind of Workshop

by Joe Weil September 30, 2010 Academia

Poets are limited if they read nothing but their own poetry and spend the rest of their time reading novels or thrillers. Most of my beginning students have never purchased a book of poems. They wish to write poetry, but they do not wish to read it. They read fantasy fiction mostly. So the first [...]

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The Future of Poetry at the Research University

by Micah Towery June 27, 2010 Academia

Wendell Berry , and it got me thinking. While I know this news story isn’t directly related to the topic of poetry (and this is–loosely–a poetry blog), I can’t help but feel it connects on some other level as we (poets) think about the relationship of our poetry to the world around us. Most of [...]

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Herman Melville Drinks Your Milkshake

by Micah Towery May 13, 2010 Academia

I was fortunate enough to have a American Literature professor who blew off the typical survey class BS and just gave us some of the best literature of the 19th century: Hawthorne, Dickinson, Melville, among others… In that class, I read Moby-Dick for the first time. I believe I read most of it over the course…

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Imitation/Interaction: the Greek Anthology, Augustine, the Psalms

by Micah Towery April 28, 2010 Academia

I want to do a bit of a meditation on the nature of voice and how the self is written into a poem. When I first read Augustine’s Confessions, I felt I had discovered one of the hidden hinges of the modern “voice.” I was familiar with classical writing, and the coldness of the speaking [...]

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Ain’t No Sunshine in My Shell

by Samantha Zighelboim March 28, 2010 Animals

A Green Crab’s Shell Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like– though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws’ gesture of menace and power. A gull’s gobbled…

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Waverly Gate

by Sarah V. Schweig March 10, 2010 Academia

Life consists of propositions about life. —Wallace Stevens I. A certain esteemed professor requires that those enrolled in his poetry workshop meet with him in his downtown studio apartment, right off Washington Square. Once inside, the student hands over a few poems and watches the professor–clipboard in one hand, red pen in the other–scrutinize every [...]

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The Lyric Workshop, Session 1: Theme From Shaft

by Sarah V. Schweig February 24, 2010 Academia

PROFESSOR: Mary Ann, would you mind reading your poem aloud so that we can hear it in your own voice? MARY ANN: Absolutely. Ahem. Who’s the black private dick That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? SHAFT! Ya damn right! Who is the man that would risk his neck For his brother man? SHAFT! [...]

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