Poetry

Browse our essays and reviews on poetry.

Syntactical Splurges

Bernadette Mayer’s The Scarlet Tanager.

  • Bryn Canner

Developing “Soft Eyes”

We must remain promiscuous with our binaries.

  • Robert Archambeau

On the Limits of Binary Thinking

Final repsonse: Why does any of this matter?

  • Marjorie Perloff

Canon-Formations

The avant-garde canon is racially homogenous.

  • Cathy Park Hong

The “I” of Lyric

The middle ground between “conservative” and “conceptual.”

  • Dan Beachy-Quick

Legitimate and Illegitimate Poems

There are really just two kinds of poetry these days.

  • Katie Degentesh

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Pages and Soundscapes

All too often we treat poems as either written or spoken.

  • Lytton Smith

An Introduction to Alterity

The artist in me courts difficulty and complexity.

  • Noah Eli Gordon

Loaded Terms

We must not reduce the complex field of poetics to a simple dichotomy.

  • Evie Shockley

Heads Will Roll [or: I Did It My Way]

We must synthesize and expel binarial compounds.

  • Rebecca Wolff

The Freedom of Meter

Do real poets write in free verse?

  • Annie Finch

Scientist or Mystic

Being a scientist in poetry has a clear trajectory and a long history.

  • Dorothea Lasky

Irony and Sophistication

Irony is not on one end of a spectrum, with feelings at the other.

  • Anthony Madrid

The Purposeful Lyric Life

I never got over the lyric charisma of poems in the first place.

  • Sandra Lim

Hybrid Poets Exist

Binary thinking is unproductive.

  • Samuel Amadon

The Difference Between Poetry and Song Lyrics

It is absurd to contend that lyrics inherently have less literary merit than poetry, or are easier to create

  • Matthew Zapruder

The Easy and the Hard

Tarring nouns such as “creativity” with scare quotes is easy.

  • DeSales Harrison

Ways to the New

So many binaries circulate in and around contemporary poems.

  • Stephanie Burt

Lying in a Hammock at Blue Mountain Center

“I have wasted my life.” A poetic response to Marjorie Perloff.

  • Maureen N. McLane

Who Are the Modernists’ Heirs?

Who are the modernists heirs? A poetic response to Marjorie Perloff.

  • Ange Mlinko

Glut Reactions

The Demographics of American Poetry

  • Mike Chasar
  • Jed Rasula

Gone

For Mark Strand, the End Is in Sight

  • Jay Deshpande

Deathly Love and Lovely Death

Not many periods in history are as at odds with themselves as England’s Victorian era.

  • Colin Fleming

Microreviews: Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness

Dean Young’s first book of criticism is a frenetic and subversive meditation on poetry and poetics seemingly inspired by Whitman’s exhortation to “unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"

  • Jason Tandon
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