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The new anthology, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman, documents last summer’s period of quarantine and protest, bewilderment and commitment. Over the pages, the resonances build like voices gathered in a street singing justice songs.
Science relies on metaphors. The work that metaphors do, after all, is to either make the familiar strange, or to make the strange familiar. Science is full of strangenesses, difficult for most of us to grasp unless we have something more quotidian to compare it to. Space, in particular, makes us feel the necessity of…
With many contemporary poets publishing (sometimes multiple) memoirs, there’s clearly a desire for these writers to share their worlds in a form other than poetry. Is it as simple as the appealing arc of a compelling narrative? What other issues might come to bear, particularly in our current social landscape, for a poet to share her experience, to say, This is my story—without the poetic slant?
Emerging in the late 1970s and already diminishing by the early 1980s, Martianism was a short-lived yet influential movement in British poetry. Principally associated with Craig Raine and Christopher Reid*, it derived its name from the title poem of Raine’s second collection, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), in which the eponymous alien recounts…
Recently, a trend has emerged: more and more poets are turning to memoir. In the last two weeks alone I have read essays by Tracy K. Smith about her new memoir and reviews of Elizabeth Alexander’s. Both detail the reasons for the authors’ switch in form, making me wonder, as Smith does in her essay, if prose offers something…
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