Kissing Walt Whitman
I saw all the things we consider “Whitmanesque”: the energy, the exuberance, the empathy. And one thing that my mother’s serene portrait had not prepared me for—the eroticism.
Walt Whitman
Why the Language of Awesomeness Fails Us
We trust the language of betrayal. If a teen writer wants to win a contest, let her turn not to the wonders of the world but to its horrors. Profundity is biased toward the grim, and injustice is not ageist.
Whitman and Dickinson and the Civil War
Contemporary American poetry was born in the context of the Civil War, the war that claimed more Americans than ever before or since. Whitman and Dickinson, two of America’s seminal poets, were alive and writing poetry during the Civil War.
American Poetry: Video and the Evolution of Language
The composition of poetry has taken on a new life. Poetry has evolved from oral and traditional forms, to print and performance, and to our present moment where an amalgam of all forms is possible with technology. Video is a revisiting of the oral and performative traditions of poetry in a contemporary context. Moving images can address the human experience and maintain the complexity of ideas, range of emotions, and clarity of language as does written poetry.
Round-Up: Ancient Egyptian Stories, Tom Hanks, and Walt Whitman
From newly translated ancient Egyptian stories to Walt Whitman’s lost novel, here’s the latest literary news.
On Abstraction and Acessibility: Poetry, Perspective, and the Painting of Jordan Kantor
Lately, I’ve been particularly intrigued by the work of Jordan Kantor. His work has prompted me to revisit how I have been formulating the Venn diagram of poetry and painting. Kantor is an artist who gets many things right.
Accessing Social History through Books
The required reading for the entering undergraduate class the year I enrolled was Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen. I didn’t read it.
Lilies in the Yard: On Getting Away
I reread Sylvia Plath this summer on a fairly remote island off Ireland’s Connemara coast. Plath had been there once in September of 1962. She and Ted Hughes accepted an invitation from the Irish poet, Richard Murphy, to visit him at his home in the country’s heralded west.
Urban Pastoral: American City Poets and Poems
American poetry has a rich tradition of creating space for the full truth of our cities in poems and drawing connections between the interdependent worlds of American city life. Thinking about this tradition in formal terms, we might call it the urban pastoral.