Michael’s Palmer’s short biography sets him apart from the Language School of poets as one who still uses lyricism because he believes that narratives are inevitable in poetry. In his poem, “I Do Not” however, we still see the kind of evasion of directness that puts him firmly in relation to this school, as the […]
Pink-Collar Poetic Resistance and A Day Without Women
Karen Kovacik describes in “Between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Lyric: The Poetry of Pink-Collar Resistance” how a category of female poets has been largely unnamed and thus, ignored because of their refusal to restrict their writing to any one category. Kovacik explains that a “group of working-class writers who borrow frequently from the aesthetic approaches of both […]
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 […]
Race in Poetry: A Creative Imitation and Experiment of Racial Bias
I Am a White Woman I am a white woman the sound of my speech some distant crescendo of laughs is written in a minor key and I can be heard laughing in the light Can be heard […]
Maxine Hong Kingston and New American Poetry
James Edward Smethurst’s “Foreground and Underground: the Left, Nationalism, and the Origins of the Black Arts Matrix” intrigued me to read more into the Asian American constituent, specifically Maxine Hong Kingston. Born and raised in California’s Central Valley to Chinese parents, Kingston attended Berkeley in the 1950s where she studied English and became exposed to the […]
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 […]
Complicated: A Response to Amiri Baraka’s “Black Arts”
Thank You Because somebody had to do it because words are weapons: fists and daggers, guns. And your guns were not indiscriminate your poems were not bullshit, they were a hot-handed snapshot that hurts liberal eyes almost forty years later just like acid in the face of the enemy. The violence is what the […]
Anne Sexton’s Public Body in “Wanting to Die”: Making the Internal External
The confessional nature of Anne Sexton’s “Wanting to Die” makes the internal external, and involves an exploration of the personal body as an object of public study rather than an object of privacy. The body becomes a subject of study in the first stanza when the speaker addresses an unnamed “you” who has asked a […]
My Confession: The Silent Year
I was drawn to the Confessional poets not for their mental struggles or the Freudian undertones and experience in psychotherapy, but because they offer real and true accounts of life, ugly as it is at times. I began writing this poem in my head before even diving into any of the confessional poets’ work and it […]
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 […]