. In the new, spring issue of West, my Poetic License column offers a discussion of voice in poetry, in introduction to the poetry of John Spaulding, whose The White Train was chosen by Henry Taylor for the National Poetry Series in 2004. The first thing I look for in a poem is its voice. It is […]
Eating Poetry (XXX) – In Memory of W. B. Yeats
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/ …/A way of happening, a mouth. This coming Friday, January 28, will be the 72st anniversary of the death of W. B. Yeats, just before the calamity of the century that W. H. Auden would auger again in “September 1, 1939.” Here, one great poet of the twentieth […]
Political and Poetical Thinking
Lea Carpenter at Big Think ruminates on alternative responses and needs attached to the “Ground Zero” Islamic center dispute. In “A Poet for the Mosque,” she writes, Let them build it. Is this what the rationalists want us to say? Let them build it. These four words counter the one, more emotional one—never—echoing across anger […]