Insights

Dynamite and Its (Poetic) Packaging

“A short poem need not be small.” -Marvin Bell On the plane from London to New York, I took in three stunning debuts: Mona Arshi’s sensual, wistful, and surreal poetry; Sarah Fletcher’s imaginative, accomplished, and wry personae; Anja König’s incisive, keenly observed notes on loss–and wrote brief reviews of each for HuffPost Books. You can …

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How to Lie With Statistics (and Poetry)

“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” -Emily Dickinson It’s pretty easy, really. Take a four-thousand-year-old universal human tradition–say, poetry–and use statistical data within a relatively tiny segment–say, the last ten years in America–to extrapolate into sweeping conclusions. In a recent article for the Huffington Post, I call out this tactic employed by a …

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Innovation and Craft in Visual Art

Innovation and Craft: A Trans-Atlantic Theory of Poetry

“Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock” -Emerson Dichotomies are often false but useful. Contemplating the similarities and differences between British and American poetry, having steeped myself in both for some time now, I have been slicing my experiences as a reader along two axes: innovation and craft. Ancestors …

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