theKalliope

Category: Poem Readings

  • “The Mice,” by Lindsay Turner

    In Lindsay Turner’s first book, Songs & Ballads, I felt like the poem used language as an imposition, or a fabric of the scene. Or there was something the poet wanted to comment on, and the language for the poem was an impetus to think about her response. Looking at the sky in “Song of…

  • [they won’t see us coming], by Valerie Hsiung

    It’s helpful to understand the slipperiness inherent to a Valerie Hsiung’s poem. And by slippery I mean that feeling when you think you have ahold of something, only to feel it slip out of your hands. A bar of soap. A dish you’re washing by hand. Reading [they won’t see us coming], Hsiung coaxes me…

  • “3.21.2004,” by Sawako Nakayasu

    Please start this close reading with some basic instructions. Not from Sawako Nakayasu. Though it would be a delight to interview Nakayasu and ask how she would like readers to prepare themselves for the pieces in her book, Texture Notes. The instructions are my suggestion, because the book is not so much “poetry” as “notes…

  • “The New World,” by Kelly Schirmann

    There is a movement to prose paragraphs when they appear in poetry books. Something separate from the “prose poem,” which is structured to look like a paragraph, because the materials, being part of a surreal vision or a dream, just won’t settle into regular verse. It needs to feel like the poet felt it, happening…

  • “02.03.16,” by Laynie Browne

    I don’t feel entirely qualified to make some grand statement about how Laynie Browne approaches books (like does she always write her books as a project, or are the three books I have read coincidentally project books); however, I can register with some confidence that when one of Browne’s books steps into its project, the…

  • “As You Came from the Holy Land,” by John Ashbery

    I’ve been thinking about the role of temporality in poetry. How time might appear in a poem. And the surprising ways that time might be made to matter. Its conspicuousness. To my mind, it always feels natural to think of time in, say, a Frank O’Hara poem. Lunch Poems even by its title, signaling a…

  • Nicholson’s Ekphrasis

    There is a certain intellectual ethos in Sara Nicholson’s April. And it’s hard for me to get a handle on the source for it. Is it the New Lyric style—how it feels conversant with its subject matter? Is it the subjects it approaches? Approaching topics like infinity or archetype? Like in the poem “A Crown…

  • “The No Scent Story,” by Basie Allen

    In the book review I wrote for Basie Allen’s Palm-Lined with Potience, I tried to convey an enthusiasm for the book. Its poetic energy. Its voice so present on the page. Like that way my fellow grad school classmates would read Frank O’Hara, and me with them, and it would feel like a baptism. This…

  • On Genevieve Kaplan’s [aviary]

    On Genevieve Kaplan’s [aviary]

    I originally started this point wanting to write out my thoughts on Genevieve Kaplan’s poem, “They trail there, they trail.” But it’s difficult to write about that poem alone without setting it in the context of the overall collection, [aviary]. The poem stands on its own, of course. How it singles out some specific yellow…

  • The Hyperobjective

    The Hyperobjective

    For many years, I’ve been interested in the scope of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poems. Their attention to limits. Their expansion beyond limits, but in this way where acknowledging how limits exist is the life of the poem. Both inside and outside of that limit. For instance, her book, Nest, is about the concept of nests. Or…