poets

First Thaw This morning was the first time: all the snow that buried us receding, still in drifts piled high, crusted with ice and yet receding, slowly drawing back—abandoned cars revealed, crushed grass, the shattered road ice-slicked, salt-splashed, slush running downstream, breaking up over the drains, dissolving….All this time I thought the whole world lost, [...]

Tupelo Press. 2013. 60 pages. “Memory remembers matter remembers/ Make make make make” –Lee Sharkey In The Book of the Dead, Muriel Rukeyser writes, “What three things can never be done? Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.” In Calendars of Fire, Lee Sharkey refuses to be that historian or activist, tamed in middle age, no longer [...]

Plato wanted poets expelled from his ideal republic because they did not arrive at truth by methodology, but, according to him and the ancient Greeks, poets came to truth by way of being possessed by a divine afflatus: a god, a demon, the muses. Of course, this truth the poets came by wasn’t always verifiable [...]

1. So what are some other major facets of Ashbery’s relationship to American pragmatism? How would we characterize pragmatism, and in what ways does Ashbery’s work suggest our characterization? Does Ashbery ever explicitly mention James, Dewey, or Rorty? (I know of only one place currently where Rorty mentions Ashbery; it is in his introduction to [...]

This entry is part of a series, The Disappearing» The Disappearing is a new app for , and that (literally) explores poetry and place. Beginning with a collection of over 100 poems about Sydney, the app creates a poetic map charting traces, fragmentary histories, impressions and memories. Along with previously unpublished poetry, The Disappearing features [...]

Forgive me if these writings on Eliot sound a bit English in their method and tone but I’ve been reduced to reading an American for the past few weeks, so my folly is at once forgivable. Eliot is, indeed, the most American of poets, if and perhaps especially because he abandoned America. There are other [...]

One of the most curious aspects about poetry is that the element of “truth” presented in any given poem is never stable. With this in mind, the truth that the reader must accept at face value is constructed by the poet out of his or her organic impulses, and must be credible simply because the [...]