Poetry and Poetics

Poem In Which Spring Returns (or French peasants who are really from Cobble Hill) Melissa Sheppard Spring comes or maybe it doesn’t, or I come—a sort of spring, painful shoots sticking out of the ground— a woman of shoots, and each one painful. This is the tulip song I sing to my daughter. I say [...]

My dad gave me some hard line rules to live by: never cross a picket line. Be good to old ladies. Know that any job, no matter how prestigious, is just a job. And when all else fails, never cross a picket line or rat someone out. These are some hard line rules for readers [...]

Hey friends, Mary Karr and I have started a YouTube video series called Poetry Fix. . Twice a week on Mondays and Fridays we’ll upload a 2-4 minute video where we read a poem and briefly discuss it. We’re trying to pimp poetry for average humans. Any feedback is appreciated. We hope you enjoy. And [...]

In a recent post, I based a discussion about the relationship between the poetic line and print culture on some of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas. I was recently listening to the below lecture by McLuhan and he discussed the effects of the phonetic alphabet. He said that the phonetic alphabet divorced the visual sense from the [...]

Preamble of questions Is there such a thing as “poetic language?” For example, which of the following words are poetic: Splat, emptiness, selvage, corporatization, loom, sequester, actually, rooster, surmise, demonstrate, fart, interpretation, destiny, tooth, ineluctable, meme, vector, duplicity, comma, consequence, drive, chant, teeter, tumult, fragrant, flounder, forget, suspend? Pick four words of five words from [...]

These are my loose translations of a form in Ireland known as “three things there be.” Long before Saint Patrick came, the Irish thought in threes. They were a triune people, with a Celtic triune God, and they, like most Celts, cast spells, and framed their tales by the magic of threes. I have translated [...]

I wanna know which friend will die young, so I can spend more time with them now by Rachel Glaser you hurt my feelings so I lie and say, I do wanna fuck my roommate I say, We’ve pushed our beds so they share a wall dirty dishes are inevitable when you were young and [...]