I’ve been reading John Muir’s account of his 1879 trip to Alaska, which he wrote based on his journals and notes from that trip and then published in 1915. As the small ship on which he sailed was passing among…
Fady Joudah’s book textu consists almost entirely of poems that are exactly the length of a text message, 160 characters — or which are composed of stanzas that are each 160 characters. There are also a couple of prose-y poems…
Not fiction, and not non-fiction, poetry occupies the space squarely between. Truth revealed through carefully orchestrated snippets of facts and fiction combined. Fiction revealing the self through the lens of the Other. Even the most autobiographical of poets create detail…
Sometimes I’m thinking about poetry itself, not reading a specific poem. On my last trip I found myself arguing against what I remember as a definition of poetry as “strong emotion recollected in tranquility.” Of course this argument was all…
I’ve been traveling a little for business, so I’ve been on a few airplane flights. Flying always gives me a strange sense of being in-between. It gives me time to think where no one else can reach me: no phone,…
