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“You can’t outrun the holy ghost…” (by Mitch Sisskind)
Oral presentation is so important and so few poets in our day have mastered it. Why, for example, are there poetry readings instead of poetry recitations? I’m as guilty as anyone — i don’t…
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A Little Night Music [by Laura Orem]
For the past few nights, very early in the morning before the other birds stir, we’ve been hearing two owls talking with each other in the treetops outside our bedroom window. They have lengthy…
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Trochaic Theory Meets Rodgers & Hammerstein
Just got off the phone with John Hollander, who points out that all double trochees — Harry Truman, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Woodrow Wilson, et al. — are "musically inevitable" and can be sung…
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Putting chaos into fourteen lines [by Moira Egan]
Yes, I confess: I’m obsessed with sonnets. I love reading them, writing them, teaching them. What is it about this little form that’s allowed it to stick around, despite its detractors, and falling in…
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The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)
In the June 1849 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay titled "Song-Writing" in which he asserted, "For my own part, I would much rather have written the best…
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“The Most Boring Man” (by Jim Cummins)
The Most Boring Man At last I am moreboring than the most boring man at work.I see panic in his eyes as he’s washing up.I enter the restroom with a friendly smileand the charming…
