Mistakes and (Understandable) Rage: A CloseRead of Ross Gay’s “Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others”

The title of Ross Gay’s poem “Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others” recalls the kind of clarity Billy Collins found refreshing in reading Chinese poetry. Unlike […]

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Cultural Roots and Cross-Pollination: The Influence Anthologies have in Perpetuating American Schools of Poetry

During the mid-twentieth century, Robert Lowell cleaved poetics into two essential styles when he asserted a difference between the “cooked” and “uncooked.” Adhering to this concept into the latter half of the twentieth century, critics and poets have used these labels to describe emerging work. Eliot Weinberger even reaffirmed these two camps in his anthology […]

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Working Title — Black Lives Matter: The Extension of Political Poetry in the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance Revealing American Resistance to the Diversity of Black Lives

Working Title — Black Lives Matter: The Extension of Political Poetry in the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance Revealing American Resistance to the Diversity of Black Lives Through several centuries, poetry has held a position in America as an agent of social change, a medium of choice for the rebel, the activist. Poets […]

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Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers: The Postconfessional Familial Lyric

Good evening all, Though I am going to provide physical copies for tomorrow’s class, I thought I would go ahead and post my final project proposal. I am…probably going to need help rephrasing some things, focusing my research, and figuring out when to capitalize “postconfessional” and when to not.   Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers: The […]

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Life as Art, Olds as Muse

The ways in which personal life seeps into art has always been a subject that’s compelled me. This semester has granted the opportunity to study the work of authors participating in these veins. In light of the confessional and post-confessional poets we’ve read from, I’ve become even more intrigued by how our lives affect poetry and fiction […]

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Final Project Musings and To-Read List

For my paper, I’m trying to focus on investigating the idea of “double-consciousness,” racial authenticity, and identity in African-American poetics across the 20th century and into the 21st century. I want to trace how race has been poeticized and politicized through the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and today with a resurgence of racial […]

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From Old Marble Notebooks

From Old Marble Notebooks (even though the poem is not an excerpt)   A bat, a rat, and a cat all came from animals. Ghoti reads fish, remember the lessons? They say finesse for steal, box for hit, some type of way for emotion, steal on for dupe, play for mess with, lit for exciting, bet […]

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