-
Krazy Kat among the nasturtiums
COMICS=POETRY+GRAPHIC DESIGN, says Austin Kleon, who is, in turn, reprising Gregory Gallant, a.k.a. Seth–but wherever the formula comes from, I love the possibilities it raises for both comics and poetry as media. It’s my starting point for a paper I’m giving at the Modernist Studies Association conference very soon. I’ll be discussing the 1920 Krazy…
-
Chapbooks, fairy tales, and spreading the word
I didn’t know, when writing the fairy-tale-inspired long poem that became my forthcoming chapbook, Propagation, that folktales and chapbooks have a long association. Here’s what Dáithí Ó hÓgáin writes for The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales: “Printed little volumes for popular reading, chapbooks were common in several western European languages. These books contained a wide variety of…
-
Hybrid H.D.
I’ve been swimming around in H.D.’s work since my undergraduate years, on the recommendation of the writer I eventually married. I started with her memoirs of Freud and Pound, trekking up to the sunny top floor of the University of Southampton library to find them, then worked backwards to the poetry, which became…
-
Coniferous forests of hard thinking
When your child takes a summer internship in Siberia, you think, hmm, THAT’s a long way for a teenager to go to escape parental interference. Maybe you made the normal adolescent struggle for independence a little difficult? Parents can follow their kids now through multiple technologies and social media platforms, and I do. With trust,…
-
“The wonder is that you are here”: poetry, community, and Anne Spencer
One of my favorite visiting-writer stories involves a New York-based author who, while guzzling artisanal cocktails in a local restaurant, said something like, “I don’t know why anyone would bother to write if they don’t live in Brooklyn.” That was a hilariously awful remark to make to his Virginia-writer-dinner-companions, but I get it. The literary…
-
Poetry and the archives by the sea
A lot of poets write from research, and there are myriad ways to explain why. Just a few of the reasons, for me: because the past presses at me as a citizen and as a human being. Because my particular history–of my current region or my ancestors–needs puzzling through. Because I want to look outward…
-
What I did not tweet from Poetry by the Sea
Almost passed out during Claire Rossini’s poem about dissecting an albino squirrel What percentage of poets would absolutely love their reading to knock an audience member unconscious? Seymour Lipset via Claire Rossini: Those who know only one country know no country Dolores Hayden: All but death can be adjusted Meena Alexander: We have poetry so…
-
Writing the motherland
“How many of you,” Betsy asked the audience, “think you know your mother’s mind, maybe better than she knows herself?” Whoops, I thought, raising my hand. That’s arrogant of me. But trying to read my mother’s mind was one of the most urgent and constant occupations of my childhood and teenage years, and I’ve kept…
LESLEY WHEELER 