Bruce Bond Before I knew that love would end my willful ignorance of death, I didn’t think there was much left in me that was virgin, but there was. That’s why all good music is sad. It makes the wound …
Tag Archives: essay
Poetry and the Music of What Matters
Posted in November 18, 2015
Tags: Bruce Bond, essay, Fall 2015, music
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand (Plato) –or– How I Lost Faith In Poet(s)ry
Posted in November 18, 2015
Tags: Bobbi Lurie, essay, Fall 2015
Bobbi Lurie Several years ago, I opened an email which came from a poet promoting her book “for women with cancer.” It felt like a miracle. The cancer she described sounded similar to the type of cancer my closest friend …
One Day
Posted in November 18, 2015
Tags: essay, Fall 2015, Joel Solonche
Joel Solonche One day a poet opens his mouth and nothing comes out. This is the first time this has happened to him. He feels the words stuck in the back of his throat. He feels them tickle and …
Dead Pet Poems: Andrew Hudgins and the Dangers of the Sentimental
Posted in November 18, 2015
Tags: Andrew Hudgins, essay, Fall 2015, Sarah Freligh
Sarah Freligh PQ Contributing Editor The first poems I wrote were about my cats, a pair of crabby old ladies who died within months of each other at the venerable age of eighteen. I was operating on Hemingway’s dictum to …
White Space as Metaphoric Frame
Posted in August 22, 2015
Tags: essay, Jennifer Burd, Summer 2015
Jennifer Burd “Framing” has many connotations when we talk about art. We might describe it as a boundary that sets off a photograph, the silence that surrounds notes of music, or the stillness that informs the movements of a sculpture …
Baudelaire, Breton, and the Madness of Love
Posted in August 22, 2015
Tags: essay, Manash Bhattacharjee, Summer 2015
Manash Bhattacharjee Breton dreamt of people making perfect love in glasshouses. He meant glasshouses literally. But Nadja was not the glasshouse of mad love. Nadja was mad. Breton – the timid hero of madness – fled Nadja before tasting the …
Seeing The Belle of Amherst
Posted in August 22, 2015
Tags: Carol Smallwood, essay, Summer 2015
Carol Smallwood It was my good fortune recently to view The Belle of Amherst, the Tony award-winning monologue on Emily Dickinson performed by Julie Harris. Dickinson’s poem about death kindly stopping for her gave me resolve to tackle writing about …
The American Long Poem Goes West: Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend
Posted in August 22, 2015
Tags: Charlotte Mandel, essay, Summer 2015
Charlotte Mandel I want to focus attention upon critical slighting of an American epic force in the poetry of Thomas McGrath, a self-styled political revolutionary born in rural North Dakota (b. 1916, d. 1990). McGrath’s 400-page long poem, Letter to …
Going Inside the Cave: Where the Personal and Political Intersect in Contemporary Narrative American Poetry
Posted in April 6, 2015
Tags: Brian Fanelli, essay, Spring 2015
Brian Fanelli In his essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Shelley declares that poets should be “the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke takes a more confessional stance, stating that to write …
Children of a Difficult Labor
Posted in April 6, 2015
Tags: Bruce Bond, essay, Spring 2015
Bruce Bond There is no birth of consciousness without pain. —Carl Jung You must revise your life. —Rainer Maria Rilke When I first read Jung, I was 23, fresh out of my …