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Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics
Modernism’s Metronome is about poets and readers caught up in meter and unsure about their footing. When I began studying poetry in college, one of the first poems that caught my ear was a metrical tour-de-force—though I didn’t know it then— by the late modern...
The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature
A few years ago, at a get-together in Santiago, Chile, I met a local man I’ll call Luis. Amid small talk, he mentioned that he supervises a number of his family’s copper mines in the north. When I asked him how his family came to own them, he shrugged and said...
Books to Escape With
Responsible global citizens are following news about the latest in COVID-19 developments in their communities and around the world, listening to experts, and taking precautions to keep themselves and their communities safe, so many of us are finding ourselves...
Travel Agent to the (Literary) Stars
Somehow, without quite meaning to, I’ve become a sort of de facto travel agent to the (literary) stars. It all began in 2010 with my sixth book, Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, which concerned the...
Ballyhoo
Ballyhoo, as a word and as a title, is a paradox. What joy in saying it—Ballyhoo!—and yet, what performance and emptiness—O.E.D.: “ a showman’s touting speech.” For several years now, I’ve been interested in the cultural, personal, and even political (and...
Queer and Crip Influences and Infections
Earlier this year, Feminist Formations released a special issue on "The Biosocial Politics of Queer/Crip Contagions" guest edited by Kelly Fritsch and Anne McGuire. Featuring 10 essays as well as poetry from Qwo-Li Driskill, the issue traces the multiple and...
Professor Sums Up Dickinson's Math
Five years ago, Grinnell College professor Thomas L. Moore audited an English class on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson at his institution. A Professor, Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Grinnell, Moore worked over several years on a...
Hurricane Season Playlist
It’s June, and hurricane season has begun in the Atlantic region. Drawing on the discography of my recent book, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Poetry, this blog post offers a disaster playlist to get you through these stormy...
On Poetry in Full Color
A new Johns Hopkins book, That Swing: Poems 2008-2016, takes its title from Duke Ellington's song "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing." That statement seems to fit a collection of verse almost entirely written in meter---regular rhythms----and...
Irish Romanticism and Climate Change
Like many of my friends and neighbors in Spokane, Washington this summer, I have been preoccupied with a second consecutive year of major wildfires. We have endured prolonged stretches where the Air Quality Index has been deemed “unhealthy” or even “hazardous...
