Friend and MFA classmate Michelle Bitting just published her first chapbook, Blue Laws, with Finishing Line Press. I have pored over Michelle’s poems-in-progress during workshop, but it was a very different experience to regard this outstanding collection of finished poems, carefully arranged. From the opening poem about her brother’s suicide, I was riveted. Michelle knows …
I have heard, from multiple sources, that there is a movement afoot, especially within academia, to rebrand what I have known as avant garde or experimental poetry as “innovative poetry.” The phrase strikes me as redundant, if not tautological. All poetry worth reading innovates in some way upon language. Furthermore, the four-thousand-year history of written …
My friend and colleague Kelly Forrister (née O’Brien) stopped by this evening to hand me an autographed copy of Seamus Heaney’s New Selected Poems: 1966-1987. She studied with him and several others on a summer course at Trinity College, Dublin, and had pints with him after class. This was just after his appointment at Oxford, …
The March/April issue of North American Review arrived yesterday, bearing one of my poems. Yes, you read that right–the March/April issue arrived yesterday, at the end of November. Our nation’s oldest literary magazine is also currently one of its tardiest. As a subscriber (and now contributor), I wrote to them in June (when the December …
I am heading into the third semester at Pacific, where in lieu of ongoing commentaries on individual works, I will be writing a longer critical essay. At this point, I am thinking about writing about Seamus Heaney, and in particular how he successfully navigates numerous dialectic elements in contemporary poetry, such as: Narration Lyricism Free …
The aims of the stichic and lyric forms are not mutually exclusive. But when the successful elements of the stichic–such as a sense of plain speech, teleological design, and a surprising or revelatory conclusion–can be reconciled with the successful elements of lyric–such as the dense aural pleasures of rhythm and rhyme, and the compounded significance …
