Tag: #NewLyric
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“Failure Matrix,” by Eric Tyler Benick
In John Ashbery’s “As You Came From the Holy Land,” I wrote about how daily life, as told by a poem, can be about the merest rhythms, can dwell on the most predictable boredoms. Some days, as Ashbery’s poem implies, are better spent forgetting time can pass uneventfully. And some days can be spent hoping…
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[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…
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“Ekpyrosis, the Watershed,” by Joe Hall
Ekpyrosis, according to the Internet, is an Ancient Greek term that means “conflagration.” And, according to Google’s number one search result, Plato and the Christian Bible claimed the world would burn during a great apocalypse. It’s important to know this for Joe Hall’s poem, “Ekpyrosis, the Watershed” (from Oversound 9), because it’s not entirely clear…
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“Late Shift,” by Amy Woolard
What I admire in Amy Woolard’s poem, “Late Shift” is the construction of lateness, especially as you’re looking back from a later moment in life, or feeling like you might have been too late to really appreciate the life you were experiencing at that time. Young adulthood is strange, because it’s easy to reflect on…
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“Elliptical,” by Kristen Steenbeeke
Do you remember when every interesting poem was labeled “elliptical,” because it did this thing with juxtaposition or parataxis or dysjunction, and the subject matter or the poem’s voice was just spaced differently. And that made it more interesting. And God bless Stephanie Burt for setting those poems away from the LangPo and Narrative “in-fighting”…
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“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…
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“Memory and Geography,” by Stav Poleg
How surprise unfolds like slow moving silk kerchiefs. I’m surprised. But I’m slowly surprised. Like if I was commenting on what it feels like being surprised, so it slowed “surprise” a little, I could extend how I feel about it a little bit. Not that Stav Poleg’s poem, “Memory and Geography” is slow-motion. The poem…
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“Beauty, Gaze Unaverted,” by Anna Sandy-Elrod
I’m not really sure if “new lyric” is even a thing anymore. Like in 2013 I found out in 2008 people were trying to get a handle on that satisfying middle ground between lyric poem and personal essay, and I thought, this is where I want to be. I want to read poems that are…