Category Archives: Poetry
5 books to read for National Poetry Month
April marks National Poetry Month, a time to celebrate poets and their craft. Browse some of our highlights below for poetry readers and writers, plus guides to use in the classroom. Through in-depth close readings of elegies by Black women, trans* women, and non-binary writers, Radical Elegies: White Violence, Patriarchy, and Necropoetics by Eleanor Perry… Read More »
Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Art: A Cognitive Reading
I first encountered the poetry of Emily Dickinson at Smith College as a foreign student in the newly created Diploma in American Studies program in 1962. At the time I was intrigued by the complexities of her language. After my graduation in 1963, I spent the summer as a live-in curator at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum… Read More »
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
One of the main challenges when approaching Dickinson is navigating the gigantic body of criticism which is out there. My own work on Dickinson has taken me through the different stages where this is crucial – from being a student and postgraduate researcher, to an author and University lecturer. When thinking about writing about or… Read More »
Reading Baudelaire With Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence
To speak of Baudelaire is to speak of paradox and contradiction. It is to speak of a poet who is modern, amodern, and antimodern, one who vaunts transcendent correspondences and lets his poet’s halo remain trapped in the mud of the urban street. Baudelaire’s works defy any attempt characterize them except by way of a… Read More »
Remembering Diane di Prima
Diane di Prima was born on August 6, 1934 in Brooklyn and passed on in San Francisco on October 25, 2020. Di Prima was a true national treasure, having chronicled throughout her astonishing career a momentous period of American history. Although for over six decades an indomitable force in ourcultural life, Di Prima remains unfamiliar to many readers. Because she was the major female identified with the Beat movement and author of the hip-language-inflected book This Bird Flies Backward (1958) who lounged in slacks sitting atop a piano—as a famous photograph from the fifties depicted her during a poetry reading— and due to the appearance a decade later of Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968), she has been misperceived as a “Beat chick.”
Happy Birthday, Dylan Thomas!
Guest post by Adrian Osbourne Perhaps for many of us, particularly once beyond a certain age, birthdays provoke a mixture of happiness, as a day that celebrates our arrival into the world, and apprehension, for the passing of time and our inevitable exit. For Dylan Thomas, this antagonism proved a powerful source of literary inspiration. Thomas was born 106 years ago in Swansea, on 27thOctober 1914, and has… Read More »
Poetry as a Tool for Organizing Communities (On Lewis MacAdams’s Birthday)
Guest post by Nate Mickelson Born October 12, 1944, the poet and activist Lewis MacAdams passed away in Los Angeles in April 2020 after a long illness. He was a champion of everyday people and an advocate for forging connections between the built and natural environments of the city. MacAdams served for thirty years as the director of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), a community organization he… Read More »
Poetic Meaning and Poetic Experiences
Guest post by Nate Mickelson I’ve had the good fortune to be talking about my new book City Poems and American Urban Crisis a fair amount over the past few months. Whether with students or colleagues, I’ve tried to put across two core arguments: 1) poetry about cities can function as a tool of analysis… Read More »
Who Gets to Call Themselves a Poet?
Guest post by Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko, co-authors of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology The flippant answer to this question is also the real answer: anyone. Everyone. You. Poet is not some mystical status to which one can ascend only after years of study or initiation into some secret club. It doesn’t… Read More »