Tag Archives: essay

Poetry and the Music of What Matters

Posted in November 18, 2015
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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 …

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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
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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 …

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One Day

Posted in November 18, 2015
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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 …

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Dead Pet Poems: Andrew Hudgins and the Dangers of the Sentimental

Posted in November 18, 2015
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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 …

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White Space as Metaphoric Frame

Posted in August 22, 2015
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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 …

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Baudelaire, Breton, and the Madness of Love

Posted in August 22, 2015
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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 …

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Seeing The Belle of Amherst

Posted in August 22, 2015
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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 …

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The American Long Poem Goes West: Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend

Posted in August 22, 2015
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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 …

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Poetry Writing Hacks: 7 Playful Ways To Create Poetry

Posted in April 6, 2015
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Laura Weldon Kids are eager to liberate poetry from the stuffy good-for-you closet where it’s so often kept. That is, as long as they can do so playfully. Each time I lead poetry-writing workshops I learn from students as young …

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“Tree by Charity”: Robert Frost and the American Christmas

Posted in April 6, 2015
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Adam Bryant Marshall At the end of his book Christmas in America, historian Penne L. Restad concludes that, despite the sense that “profanation, secularization, commercialization, and prevalence throughout American life have delustered it…Christmas remains the most important holiday on our …

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