A few years ago, Stephen Dunn and I tackled the issue of the aesthetic of irony that has dominated postmodern poetry. About this aesthetic, I think David Foster Wallace put it best in Infinite Jest, “What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human since to …
stanza, late 16th century: from Italian meaning station, stopping-place, or room. Four years ago, I bought a house, a small, three-bedroom ranch in Frostburg, Maryland. I liked its midcentury modern touches (archways, a telephone nook) and its humble size on a good plot of land. I was moving from a two-bedroom apartment and would have …
One of the hardest things to think about in terms of revision beyond the first draft is seeing what’s possible outside the margins of what’s already written, which is to say not how to make the poem longer, tighter, musically more compelling, but, rather, to explore the alternative poems running parallel to the original. What …
Atomic Structures If a word is an atom and a line is molecule, then the poem is a compound. Change any item in any given line and you alter, in some way, the molecule/compound. Even if the alteration is minor, such as replacing that article a with the, we change the compound slightly just as …
Often, we’ll talk about the ear of a poem—its aurality, how the poem sounds. We talk about alliteration and rhyme and the elusive “flow” of the poem and figure out that poems are about how they sound in our ear as listeners. And why not? We go to poetry readings, sit in the audience, pay …
Mark Doty’s “Broadway” begins with this opening: “Under Grand Central’s tattered vault / —maybe half a dozen electric stars still lit— / one saxophone blew….” It’s an opening that places us, and highlights the constellations on the ceiling of Grand Central’s main terminal. A page later into the poem we are told “The rooftops were …
I’m thinking of pacing, specifically of someone (an expectant father, ala the fifties cliche?) pacing a room: walking in one direction then turning and walking back. In this regard the gesture is akin to the etymology of verse– “Old English fers, from Latin versus ‘a turn of the plow, a furrow, a line of writing,’ …
In the opening chapter of The Triggering Town, aptly titled “Writing off Subject,” Richard Hugo writes that a “poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts or ‘causes’ the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean.” Further …