Poetry and Poetics

Amid Alien Corn in the Communion of Hang

by Joe Weil Arts & Society
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Because I knew how Abraham had traveled under a night sky so vast, so glutted with stars and had heard God’s promise, I wept when I first read Mark Twain’s description of Huck and Jim looking up at the night sky and wondering about the origin of the stars, and I was awed by Cervantes when he had Quixote and Sancha under the same sky.

John Ashbery: A Pageant

by Andrew Field Poetry and Poetics
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Characters:Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, James Merril, Robert Lowell

The Spine of Longing

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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Certain mechanisms exist in the human brain that when brushed by a combination of memory and bodily functions, demand interpretation.

Poetry Essay #3: Checking Out Old Loves

by Joe Weil Arts & Society
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Guns to the right of me! Jargon to the left of me! All volley and hold the thunder (after all, thunder may be perceived as a semiotic indicator of male patriarchy). I look at my daughter and say: “I’m so sorry, but I wanted you to exist.

“The Imminence of a Revelation Not Yet Produced”: Ashbery and the Pragmatist Sublime

by Andrew Field Poetry and Poetics
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“The imminence of a revelation not yet produced” is a remarkable formulation for describing the process of the future unfolding, and it is what I hope to signify by the term the “pragmatist sublime.”

Poetry Essay #1

by Joe Weil Arts & Society
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Does feeling write us? Does the landscape watch us vanish without trying to understand us?

Meditations of an Oaf

by Joe Weil Arts & Society
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Error must find a way to charm bias.

On Shema Mitzvah in my poetry

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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I do not believe in the separation of faith and works, but, like James, believe faith without works is dead, and works without faith is merely materialism as a form of the dole.

Georg Trakl in Plato’s Republic

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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Poetry, like music, like dance, might be defined as the precision of ecstasy, and the ecstasy of precision, an ecstatic precision, and measured ecstasy.

Lists and Parataxis: A primer for those who want it

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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Whitman has more listings than an anal retentive suburbanite.

Why Weirdness Can Be a Good Thing: the Aesthetic Satisfactions of a Compelling Strangeness

by Andrew Field Poetry and Poetics
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What is the difference between a poem we call mawkish, or overly sentimental, and a poem that carries the right amount of sentimentality and wit?

The Ironic and the Un-Ironic: the Role of the Hero in Ashbery and Creeley

by Andrew Field Poetry and Poetics
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If Ashbery’s poems are premised, if distantly, on a hope for the future, a hope for new imaginary communities, a hope for a new way of speaking, Creeley’s poem are cynical about the future, isolated from community, and unable to even speak.

“Contemplations” on a Massachusetts Poet: American Muse

by Micah Towery Poetry and Poetics
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The story of Cain is built into the founding mythos of America, whose people were cast out of Europe to violently master “uncivilized” land.

“Contemplations” on a Massachusetts Poet: A Neo-Platonic Quest

by Micah Towery Poetry and Poetics
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The ecstasies of the “secular” are sacred.

“Contemplations” on a Massachusetts Poet: Introduction and Form

by Micah Towery Poetry and Poetics
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Bradstreet is an outlier of most received literary groupings.

What Is This Thing Called Free Verse? (A primer for those who want it)

by Joe Weil Poetry and Poetics
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Poets want to get away with murder.

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