If I Could Have A Baby With Symmetry or Another Solid Object Surely, this sweat isn’t the same sweat It couldn’t be. There’s no sizzle Pop or stop to missing your Hair kinking up with enthuse— my greatest pleasure. Your eyes In teaching moments. In real time my world swells and this is almost Too […]
Author Archive | Sam
Who’s History? Lucille Clifton “I AM ACCUSED OF TENDING TO THE PAST”
When I read Lucille Clifton’s “I am accused of tending to the past” I am reminded of why we as a collective humanity read poetry. Clifton distills the elements of our human condition that transcend time—like history, reproduction, care, and the power of language and punctuates these elements with inventive brevity. To me, this poem […]
An Earnest Attempt at New Formalism
Speaking of Scales September enters softly; see my soul Is seeking new depths, taking lighter steps. Trees of myrtle give leaves to the hungry ground, Where this season’s first red and gold are found; They trace proof of blood, and rage, heroes loaned. O Muse how I hunger, o how I groan! For a heav’n: […]
Margaret Kissam Morris on Audre Lorde: Embodied Identity and the Power of the Erotic
Author Margaret Kissam Morris refers to the many identifying descriptors Audre Lorde claimed over the course of a prolific lifespan and likens them as having a shared unity in her article “Audre Lorde: Textual Authority and the Embodied Self.” These monikers find commonality as they share the makeup of Lorde, and Morris likens this to “Rosi […]
Poet-Turned-Rockstar: Tyne Daile Sumner on Anne Sexton’s Band
In the article “Anne Sexton, Singer: ‘Her Kind’ and the Musical Impetus in Lyric Confessional Verse,” Tyne Daile Sumner illuminates the unfolding landscape of the postwar American lyric in popular and counterculture, inviting us to consider reading lyric confessional verse by emphasizing the kinetic and sonic implications of the lyric poem often inferred in readers’ […]
Unfinished Business Makes the World Go Round: Poetic Tension in Olson’s “Maximus, to Himself”
Reading Charles Olson’s “Maximus, to Himself” (1960) in isolation from the collected The Maximus Poems struck me with a particularly uncanny feeling given the poem’s repeated fascination with estrangement and the complicated status of the individual. The poem is predominantly declarative, even in its reflective manner, which I believe creates a sense of authority in […]
Experimentation “Off the Beaten Path”
After reading the assigned selections from this week’s focus on Beat poetry, I decided to try my hand at producing a poem influenced by some of the aesthetics and conventions of the group. The poem “Holding Down the Fort” included above is the result of this experimentation. Before composing this poetic experiment, I considered how […]