Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

I recently gave an invited lecture to the Engineering Honors Club at the Uni- versity of Southern California on the topic “What ...

Direction Age as a centripetal force. She can’t hold the ¤ctive panoply of characters apart. Is that scary? Origin’s a sore poin ...

than in either Creeley’s or Plath’s lyric. There is no positioned observer, whose insights are detailed one by one. The ¤rst lin ...

picks up on one item that arrests the reader’s attention and often ignores the rest. But a close reading—and there is no other w ...

this is never said directly. Instead, she gives us a “dream narrative” called “Mark” that at ¤rst seems absolutely naturalistic ...

work sometimes object that poems like “The Birthmark” and “Direction” are not suf¤ciently concrete or graphic, that this poet’s ...

as a self-acknowledged outsider, a loner. “I myself,” as she puts it in “Writing” (Pretext 10), “was always a forwarding address ...

“tone-shifting” and “peculiar overlaps,” as she calls them, for collage entails the juxtaposition, on the same verbal plane, of ...

but what it cannot do without is what Aristotle called to prepon—¤tness or relatedness. In the line “Origin’s a sore point,” for ...

Visibility blocking the view. Although we associate the manifest with kindness, we do. The way it goes, where it goes, slight do ...

the later books of Wordsworth’s Prelude. “Joy rivulets along the sand,” “what happens” is “Always more heavily / laden,” the sel ...

Evolution—a future where perhaps we accept ourselves as we are—is never quite complete. These speculations on the aporias of sex ...

“pretty” response to her dying mother’s behavior in the nursing home; she is unsparing in showing her own failings as well as th ...

intransigence, the edge, that we ¤nd in the best Language poetries. Its audi- ence may well be wider, but its reach, probably na ...

In 1999 Jeffrey Di Leo, the editor of Symploke, was putting together a volume of essays on the subject of affiliations, those co ...

¤xed, the attributes of which I like to try to de¤ne and put in some perspec- tive. And in a curious way, I am—I might as well c ...

course, because there was already a body of received opinion on the Gregory elegy, beginning with Frank Kermode’s remarks in Rom ...

Diego, was close at hand (I was then teaching at the University of Southern California), and we must have had literally hundreds ...

academy that I often ¤nd stuffy and irrelevant. True, I have had some won- derful colleagues, but on the whole I ¤nd that I just ...

or Medieval studies. The latest tenure case or promotion scandal, the job mar- ket news, the new endowment gift or budget shortf ...