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Purity and Nonsense [Part 1] (by Brian Brodeur)
Kenneth Goldsmith, the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural Poet Laureate, has been getting some press lately. With his pseudo-Dadaist philosophy of Everything’s a poem! Goldsmith has been regurgitating the perennial complaint that poetry is…
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“Champion of the Obsolete Event”: An Appreciation of Richard Frost’s Neighbor Blood (Sarabande 1996) (by Brian Brodeur)
I’ve started taking an unofficial survey among poets and writers still young enough to be labeled emerging. Whenever I meet a new one, I ask if she's heard of the poet Richard Frost. Though…
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My Desires are Undesirable [by Lera Auerbach]
I am not sure how this happened – but I am writing a book of aphorisms. To make matters worse – this book will be published soon! And if that was not bad enough…
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Next Line, Please: Lehman Picks the Title of the American Scholar’s Crowd Sourced Sonnet
On Tuesday, May 6, The American Scholar launched a website experiment in writing crowd-sourced poetry—in this case, a rhyming sonnet. David Lehman supplied the first line and picked subsequent lines from reader submissions. Last…
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“Give Me Your Tired Your Poor”
From today's Writer's Almanac: Today in 1884, the cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal was laid. It was largely funded by an auction of contributed art and literary works. Emma Lazarus, 34 years…
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On Corrupting the Youth (by Brian Brodeur)
During a recent conference meeting with a student in my Introduction to Poetry workshop, I experienced a rare (for me) fit of speechlessness. Actually, it happened twice. I’d asked my students, all undergraduate non-English-majors,…
