Category: Spectacular Poems

I know Alice Notley isn’t the only person to write about the relationship between “line” and “sentence,” but I have always appreciated the illustrations she uses in her essay, “American Poetic Music at the Present Moment.” (found in Coming After (University of Michigan Press, 2005)) For a long time, I don’t think I was a…

I appreciate the immediacy of Dueñas characterization of a city–its chaos, a many-armed chaos, or a many-ways-visited-upon-the-poet chaos. And it’s for multiple reasons this chaos exists. Like, um, a city is just chaotic by nature. Consider construction of anything, the serpentine relationship between rebar and concrete. The serpent-like relationship when a person is wandering the…

As I describe in my goodreads review of Prikryl’s book, Midwood (Norton, 2022), the poems have this remarkably swift practice of establishing their primary concern, or their narrative setting. For instance, in her poem, “Field Trip,” she quickly positions the awkward and slightly alienating position a parent has on a field trip with her child,. How it…

What I really enjoyed about Goldman’s poem is how it positions the self among nature, and then thinks about the world from this perspective. What is it to be a self among nature? How is it someone would feel themselves as a self if they saw the world like that? Like a continually multiplying self-awareness…