consider what must be happening when we set out to produce a poem

There are no more two distinct brain sides than there are two distinct genders. Why would that surprise anyone who’s ever created anything? from “A Moment’s Thought” by Ellen Bryant Voigt in her excellent collection The Flexible Lyric The recent bicameral (and thoroughly Nietzschean) model—right brain for intuition, emotion, art, and music; left brain for [...]

Read Full Post »

New Work Up

I’ve started a new set of pages for my craft essays and poetry reviews, accessed through a new tab at the top of this page. First up are two essays using Scott McCloud’s theory of transitions from Understanding Comics to consider how poems are sequenced in collections. If you like comics or syntax, you’ll probably [...]

Read Full Post »

Genius on Genius—McHugh on Dickinson’s Dash

I’ve both understood and been completely mystified by Dickinson’s use of dashes since meeting her voice in high school. Finally, FINALLY, someone makes sense of it for me, in terms of how writers can manipulate syntax to create meanings, contradictory meanings, and multiple meanings all with the same few words. from “What Dickinson Makes a [...]

Read Full Post »

Heather McHugh on Emily Dickinson’s inexhaustibility

from “What Dickinson Makes a Dash For” in Broken English: It is not the definable (delimitable), finally, that interests Dickinson; she is drawn precisely to that uneasier thing, what can’t be said. The relative exhaustibility of a literary construction is one measure of its inadequacy to this truth; and Dickinson’s sentences and lines often seem [...]

Read Full Post »

article slapdown: “a” vs. “the”

…the noun articulated by a “the” has a history: it comes again, and was foreseen; it doesn’t just occur, but re- and precurs. When “the bear comes out of the woods,” he’d been known or mentioned before; when “a bear comes out of the woods,” it’s somewhat more alarming, less expected—he has not appeared before, [...]

Read Full Post »

All poetry is fragment

All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn. It is the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page, toward the unsung, toward the vacancy made visible, that wordlessness in which our words are couched. Its lines insistently defy their own medium by averting themselves from the [...]

Read Full Post »

if you’ve even remotely been following my syntax fascination

then you’ll get why my mind was completely flooded with the power and genius, and yeah, muscle and sinew, of this particular John Prine lyric, heard so often but never before like this, at the BonTaj Roulet Tour concert last night: “if dreams were thunder, lightning was desire” jesus. Listen to the difference if he’d [...]

Read Full Post »

muscle and sinew and music, clarity and resonance and power

from The Art of Syntax After one hundred years of free verse invention and mastery, contemporary poets need not focus solely on lineation or fall unthinking into one of the dominant conventions of our time: on the one hand, a “sincere” poem made accessible by predictable simple declarative sentences, all about the same length, chunked [...]

Read Full Post »

“But did you MEAN to write it that way?” Two

from The Art of Syntax The making of a poem is not a performance but an adventure, an act of discovery. Most poets of high formal appetite often do perceive, in advance of the concrete materials of the poem, some shape or heft or tone or set of means—what Susanne Langer calls a “formal apprehension.” [...]

Read Full Post »

“But did you MEAN to write it that way?” One

from Ellen Voigt The Art of Syntax After detailed analysis of a poem, someone usually asks whether all that has been pointed to—or any of it, for that matter—was intended by the poet. The truthful answer seems weaselly: yes and no. It’s probably not often an authentic poem of “felt though” emerges solely from a [...]

Read Full Post »