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’ […]
In this essay, Parvin Ghasemi discusses Sylvia Plath’s poetry in regard to the violence, rage, and self-hurt seen throughout. He progresses through “The Colossus,” “Daddy,” “Medusa,” and “Ariel,” which I have linked in between paragraphs. As I read this essay, I felt as though having a reading of the poems helped understand his critical analysis […]
This week’s reading of the New York School’s poetry reminded me of when Ben Hutchinson quoted the Icelandic poet, Jóhann Jónsson’s 1925 proclamation, We have been epigones since the age of the sagas. Epigones of our forefathers to one half, epigones of foreign artists to the other half. … Thus, we have with time become like […]
During my reading of this week’s selection, I became drawn especially to the poems of Robert Duncan because of how they flowed together, but also because of what they were saying. My favorite of the three that we were assigned was “Passage Over Water” which took the reader on a journey across the poem. Duncan […]
Burt Kimmelman was not on our reading list for this week, but I feel like he should have been. In addition to the books and articles on literary criticism that he has under his belt, he has also penned 11 books of poetry, with one, Steeple at Sunrise, published as recently as 2022. After reading […]
When exploring the poems for this week, I became intrigued with Larry Eigner, initially because of his seemingly simplistic poems and then because of his life story. I reread the poems we were assigned a few times and [Out of the wind and leaves] particularly stuck with me. I started researching Eigner’s life and […]
Denise Levertov (1923-1997) Lisa Narbeshuber looks into the work of Denise Levertov in her article, “Relearning Denise Levertov’s Alphabet: War, Flesh, and the Intimacy of Otherness” in which she delves into Levertov’s Vietnam-era poetry and the way the poet’s cultural writing “shares a certain universality of flesh, and it can be used to […]
In the first stanza of Ginsberg’s poem, “A Supermarket in California,” he opens with addressing Walt Whitman, the famous 19th century poet. Ginsberg walks under the full moon and then, “shopping for images,” enters a supermarket and thinks of Whitman’s enumerations. Enumerations are defined as “the action of mentioning a number of things one by […]
“’The Willingness to Speak:’ Diane di Prima and Italian American Feminist Body Politics,” written by Rosanne Giannini Quinn, discusses Diane di Prima’s significance within the context of Italian American culture. Quinn highlights many pieces of di Prima as well as many movements that she was a part of. This article was written in 2003 for […]