Medusa's Head

In Brian McHale's The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems , he starts his chapter on Susan Howe's The Europe of Trusts with a short introduction to the idea of silence of women and the canon, describing "Berryman's 'Homage'...as a kind of parable" of "the received version of literary historiography" in which women are silent or overwritten (205). McHale argues that Berryman's "poetic 'homage' to the precursor-poet consists in silencing her." (205) Anne Bradstreet , in "Upon a Fit of Sickness" writes, 'Bestow much cost there's nothing lost,/ to make salvation sure,/ O great's the gain, though got with pain, / comes by profession pure." In "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" , Berryman says as Bradstreet's persona "Hard and divided heaven! creases me. Shame /is failing. My breath is scented, and I throw / hostile glances towards God. " You mig...

Margaret Atwood confronts the male gaze directly in her poem, "Manet's Olympia."

I'm excited to say that some of my poems are up at Lingerpost with Todd Fredson as well! Check it out!

First person to comment or email me gets a brand new copy of 1999 The Iowa Poetry Prize winner Try by Cole Swenson, for the price of shipping, $2. Try comes in a square format which accomodates the long line that many of her poems play with. Looking at poems like "Prologue," you might describe Swenson's work as multi-genre, verse mixed with prose that I would not call prose poetry. It is like a nonfiction essay with bursts of lyric poetry at intervals. Try is a great collection for anyone who enjoys ekphrasis. There are a number of different approaches to writing about/in conversation with artwork, and Try illustrates, at my count about four, each reflecting something of the nature of the artwork in a nice organic way: complex and layered, streamlined and focused, ironic and casual, metaphysical and earnest. The main themes of the collection are religion, hagiography, art, the experience of art. Long sequences, short lyrics, prosey bits. My favorite poems in this collecti...

Harnessing the Power of Symbolic Objects for Good Some things I love about this photo: 1. Color 2. Allegorical Content 3. Center of Focus Here is a palette of colors: aqua, deep cadet, dove gray, spackle white, matte steel, and yellow. Everything is cool, working toward a cohesive tone. It all belongs to the same landscape, a particular mood. In this one image we have a seagull, an anchor, a boat, and the sea. All of these are literal things that are found in each other’s company, but they are all also supercharged with meaning when taken out of their ordinary context and say, for example, dropped into a Biblical quote or a Victorian morality story. What I love about this collection of symbols is that they act as themselves rather than the things they stand in for, so the immediate response is to the thing itself. The center of focus on this photo is interesting—it works in some ways like a triptych. The seagull immediately gets attention, having the most animation, but the anchor is i...