I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. … Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on…
Lyric essay: This prose poem jumbles passages from slave narratives and self-help books, Walden and the Hadith, online therapy forums and celebrity memoirs, weaving together a series of age-specific moments that shed light on the boundaries of memory and the complexities of self-presentation.
Found poetry: “I loved drawing out / the symbols / of the alphabet. / They were all / their own kind / of monster with / their own kind of tongue.”
Literary criticism: 50 years on, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” reads like a drug-addled, homoerotic variation of “Jackass.” If we aspire this year to recognize the anniversary of a Ginsberg poem that still seems relevant and challenging, we should fast-forward ten years to 1966, when the iconic Beat poet penned “Wichita Vortex Sutra.”
My nephew, Cedar, who is four years old and lives on a farm in Kansas, wrote a book for me yesterday. Since he didn’t know how to mail it to me as I make my way through Central America, his mother (my sister) transposed it into an email. I guess I’ll have to wait a…
Poetry: “Looking at a steer and / imagining balls is not / nearly so hard as / looking at balls and / imagining a bull.”
