“It is helpful to change one’s habits to address a root cause” — S. Brook Corman1 Over the last few years, I have been noticing an increasing use of the pronoun “you” in lyric poems, when grammatically the pronoun of use should be “I.” When I first presented on this observation at the 2018 Gulf Coast Association of Creative Writing Teachers Conference, I proposed that this … [Read more...]
Visionary Markings: Em Dashes and Ellipses in Walt Whitman’s “Talbot Wilson” Notebook
Before the appearance of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman kept notebooks in which he wrote sketches for lines of poetry. As Andrew Higgins points out in Art and Argument: The Rise of Walt Whitman’s Rhetorical Poetics, 1838-1855, Whitman used these notebooks to grapple with democracy, slavery, transcendentalism, and spiritualism. Higgins also notes, “But he did not yet understand … [Read more...]
