Not much has been written about Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia or Native Guard, and what has been written is mostly about the racial content of the poems. Quite a bit, however, has been written … [Read more...]
Notes on the Uses of the New Lyric “You”
“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 … [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 … [Read more...]