During the mid-twentieth century, Robert Lowell cleaved poetics into two essential styles when he asserted a difference between the “cooked” and “uncooked.” Adhering to this concept into the latter half of the twentieth century, critics and poets have used these labels to describe emerging work. Eliot Weinberger even reaffirmed these two camps in his anthology […]
Author Archive | LC
Life as Art, Olds as Muse
The ways in which personal life seeps into art has always been a subject that’s compelled me. This semester has granted the opportunity to study the work of authors participating in these veins. In light of the confessional and post-confessional poets we’ve read from, I’ve become even more intrigued by how our lives affect poetry and fiction […]
Notes from Graduate School
Frozen bread slices from the freezer. How else is one to eat. One plus two plus peanut butter chew. Take this azalea and cut its stem. Display in house for three days. Light a candle when you read. Read well and many. Be well. Eat well. With wisdom spend pennies. I sit in a rickety […]
Poem from a White Heart
Some dumb white woman, she hears you with these poems for black hearts photos of Malcolm’s hands raised to bless you all black and strong in his image of You His words like darts that tore through my small, white world my misunderstanding as a youth not knowing how much, how deep, how wide his […]
Dr. Dax Seeks to Legitimize Music Therapy
“Psychotherapy and Confessional Poetry” by Michael Thurston discusses the shift in mental health practices from psychoanalysis to psychotherapy in mid-century America. This included medicating patients through use of “tranquilizers, electroconvulsive therapy [and] insulin shock therapy” (148). Successful results yielded “docility and compliance” that brought “the mind to a socially acceptable orderliness (or at least the appearance […]
Frank O’Hara Learns that Billie Holliday Died
Frank O’Hara was a front-runner of the New York Poets, one who melded the school’s vision in language of cacophony and, often, absurdity. Many of his poems indite quirk, humor, and somewhat banal routines of daily life. He was famously prolific in his poetry, though much of it remained unpublished. The poem “The Day Lady Died” that […]
Wobble with it – Shame v. Pride and Urban Angst of the Beat Generation
In Norman Podhoretz’s “The Know-Nothing Bohemians”, he pens an article dripping with sarcasm that rails against the Beat Generation. Its opening catalogues forerunners of the Beat Generation writers, and names the works unable to find publishers. The list ends with one that has: “but thanks to the Viking and Grove Presses two of Kerouac’s original classics, On the Road […]
An uncanny re-imagining of an excerpt of Reznikoff’s “Holocaust”
I was struck by the inspiration of court records behind Reznikoff’s poetry; ones that depict a “unique, often violent history of American social life” (Modern American Poetry, 436). And certainly, his work does not shy away from portraying lives of poor immigrants in an harsh light. Reznikoff’s brief law and legal publishing career prologued his writing. He also initially wrote […]
Sterling A. Brown’s “Legend” and Empowerment of the Young Black Man
Sterling A. Brown’s “Legend” is the final selection we read from his work in the Oxford Book of American Poetry. Published in 1980, this is a poem written after his career as a professor, and near the end of his life. In it, the reader meets three characters: the old black man, the old white […]
Cultural Influences of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
Admittedly, “The Waste Land” has always intimidated me for a lot of reasons. I don’t have the proper educational background to understand all of T.S. Eliot’s references. Or, I am not “good at reading poetry”. The endnotes are tedious and exhausting to piece together, it’s a chore to understand. Whichever reason I choose on a […]