Trace Poems by Eric Pankey Milkweed Editions, 2013 $16.00 Pankey explores the idea of traces in several ways throughout this collection. One version is as traces of religious faith or traces of evidence supporting that faith. Another is traces of memory, specifically memories of Pankey’s deceased father. And finally, there are traces of meaning …
My grandmother used to turn off her hearing aids at what seemed like the oddest times. There are those in my family who considered this an act of passive aggression. The more of herself she lost to dementia, though, the more striking the difference became between those moments the hearing aids were on, and she …
It’s so easy to overlook punctuation. Our eyes are trained to glide past it, automatically registering the marks as pauses or sentence endings but not otherwise lingering over them. As Baron Wormser and David Cappella note in Teaching the Art of Poetry, “punctuation makes necessary distinctions so that things don’t blur and tangle and confuse.” …
“We know there must be consciousness in things,” writes Mark Jarman: In bits of gravel pecked up by a hen To grind inside her crop, and spider silk Just as it hardens stickily in air. Many poets might just as easily say, “We know there must be consciousness in words.” By fitting together individual bits …
by Jim Danger Coppoc So apparently, poetry is dead. I know this because I hear it at parties. I know this because all my poet friends are terrified of their own irrelevance. I know this because Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia—in the latest installment of a centuries long tradition of replaying again and …
by Jim Danger Coppoc So there’s this setup I keep walking into. I get invited to be a guest critic (and sometimes even a “celebrity” guest critic!) for workshops run by various poetry and arts organizations. At least half the time, I’m the youngest person in the room—sometimes by several decades. There’s always a wide …
A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton Alfred Starr Hamilton, Edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Song Cave, 2013 reviewed by Mike Walker A poet, perhaps more than any other type of artist, can toil in total obscurity. He doesn’t need a band or a pianist to back his …
by Dawn Potter It’s so easy to overlook punctuation. Our eyes are trained to glide past it, automatically registering the marks as pauses or sentence endings but not otherwise lingering over them. As Baron Wormser and David Cappella note in Teaching the Art of Poetry, “punctuation makes necessary distinctions so that things don’t blur and …