In Lexi Rudnitsky’s article “The “Power” and “Sequelae” of Audre Lorde’s Syntactical Strategies,” Rudnitsky examines the importance Lorde placed not only on words and language but also the form and medium of language. Rudnitsky asserts that “Lorde privileged poetry over other forms of expression because she believed that poetry alone had the ability to create […]
Archive | Critical
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 […]
Journal response to The Social Background of the Black Arts Movement
In the article, “The Social Background of the Black Arts Movement,” author Larry Neal, co-editor of Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Amiri Baraka, explores what was happening in society surrounding the Black Arts Movement. He begins by noting that Philadelphia riots, Harlem riots, and the Bay of Pigs. Civil Rights Movement was […]
Audre Lorde’s Anger and the Power it Holds
I spent a lot of time reading and rereading the Black Arts Movement poetry. I read them grouped by poet, grouped by gender, grouped loosely by age. I was trying to find ways that they were connected, things that were similar in many of the poems. To me, the thread that seemed to run through […]
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’ […]
Parvin’s “Violence, Rage, and Self-Hurt in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry”
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 […]
Lateness and Liminality
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 […]
“In Couples, In Small Companies”: On Robert Duncan and Sentimental Modernism
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 […]
Every Poet Needs Their Own Black Mountain
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 […]
Bio-Writing: Cybernetics, Open Form, and Larry Eigner’s Lifework
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 […]