Thinking Like a Mountain: On the Centennial of Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus”Â
An essay by Dave Seter
All posts filed under: Essays
Prose that encourages us to engage with books of poetry, individual poets, and issues of craft or poetics.
Kinship Archives: DNA Dreams
Gabriela Halas reckons with the language we use to describe both blood and chosen families as she carries a new child into the world in this stunning lyric essay.
Field Notes: Asemic Textile Book 1
“It is possible for language to be purely a textural landscape.” —Jennifer S. Cheng
Commentary on the Birds
An excerpt from Jed Munson’s new collection of essays.
Field Note: Birds of Prey on the Highway
“What I have discovered in my adult life, in my driving and commuting life, is that I love birds of prey.” —M. Soledad Caballero
Absence as a Silhouette: On Writing Becoming Ribbons
“Erasure poetics . . . can continue to create that wedge, that finger-hole into seeing a typographic absence as a silhouette of a person or entity that once was.”
Re/Mark-Able: Black Women Poets’ Punctuation(!
“When a black woman poet refuses punctuation, she is refusing more than standard English. She is also refusing to allow the marks of history to (over)determine her writing.”
The Poet as Shadow-Homer, as Odyssean Penelope
“Like much-named Penelope, we in the dark hours [like as not] ravel our hatch-worked images. Cunning as Penelope, we must resist, persist, outwit the bully / suitors of our world’s strictures, its demands.”
The Palinode’s Ethics of Questioning
“The tension of a palinode comes from admitting a blindness that needs to be addressed—to expose the story of your old poem as a preconceived myth.”
Flight by Flame: On Chris Abani’s Smoking the Bible
“By stitching the mundane to the profound, Abani renders a reclamation of a tender masculinity, an understanding of the relationship between joy and trauma, and a pursuit of the sacred.” –Indira Dahlstrom