Reading Whitman While White
It is only by holding Whitman accountable for all of his language that we can also love other parts of his language and poetics.
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Posts Tagged: Walt Whitman
Misery Loves Company: A Conversation with Sarah J. Sloat
Sarah J. Sloat discusses her new collection of erasure poetry, HOTEL ALMIGHTY.
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Barbara Berman’s 2020 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
Barbara Berman reviews four books in her 2020 Holiday Poetry Shout-Out
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Molly Spencer
Molly Spencer discusses her new collection, HINGE.
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Divestment
Secrecy stitched us a fraudulent reality. Denial masqueraded as hope.
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The Lonesome Home: A Conversation with Aria Aber
Aria Aber discusses her debut poetry collection, HARD DAMAGE.
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The Joy of Play: Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (10th Anniversary Ed.) by David Biespiel
Biespiel offers a number of best practices—not just for writing poems, but for living a creative life.
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A Metaphysical Inquiry: Nick Laird’s Feel Free
The work maintains a wondering backward, as it were, tracing the varied details of lived experience.
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Between Sex and Death: Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets
Survival, for Landau, is both instinctual and ultimately pointless.
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Turning and Turning: Jericho Brown’s The Tradition
[T]his is a book in direct conversation with literary tradition.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #196: Alan Chazaro
“[P]art of writing is cementing some sort of memory.”
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Making Absence Present: Save the Bathwater by Marina Carreira
Saudade is often translated as longing, and as with most translations, what gets left out matters.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky discusses his new collection, DEAF REPUBLIC.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Whitman Notebook: Which Is Ahead
Walt Whitman says that to be an American is to be a poet.
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Both/And: Republic Café by David Biespiel
How is one to make sense of making catastrophe and making love in the same moment?
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Rumpus Exclusive: “First Amendment (in the moment, grotesquely exotic)”
I am not certain where I was when I first heard about the marketplace of ideas.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Whitman Notebook: From Yourself
To write is not to dream.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Whitman Notebook: Summer Grass
Whatever is undiscovered in “Song of Myself” is in the soil.
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The Rumpus Mini-interview Project #137: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Admitting a love or joy, or yes, wonder for the natural world is, especially as a woman of color, one of the most vulnerable things we can do.”
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So Much Love of Death: A Crown of Violets by Renée Vivien
Translation always sacrifices something, and Pious, in her translations, has been consistent about the choice to cleave to some formal principles and lean away from others.
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A Very Great Scoundrel: The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks
In hindsight, it’s sometimes difficult not to read more than a bit of sadomasochism into Hopkins’s inner passions and the ways in which he resisted them.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 9): “The City Limits”
[A] nation’s poetry degenerates if it does not embody the language of what is mysterious…
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Clarence Major
Clarence Major discusses his new collection Chicago Heat and Other Stories, the artist’s role in politics, Donald Trump and race relations, and Paris in the good old days.
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The Rumpus Interview with Gregory Pardlo
Poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Gregory Pardlo discusses the reverence for poetry found in other cultures, how he strings a book together, and the future of American poetry in light of our national crisis.
...moreA Death Blow Can Be a Life Blow to Some
What does it mean to be carried away? To be captured, carried off, liberated? To lose control of oneself? Lerner doesn’t show concern for questions like these. More generally, The Hatred of Poetry takes little interest in the rarities of technique across a poet’s body of work and avoids questions about his or her sense […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Connie Wanek
Connie Wanek discusses her latest book, Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems, the challenge of looking back at older poems, and what prioritizing writing looks like.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval
I have learned to put myself, my ego, to one side and truly experience someone else’s poetry.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Something’s Happening Out There
The big crowd stretched form the gold-domed State House to Park Street. I had the urgent feeling that we were part of something. That we counted.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Dugout
So much of politics is symbolic speech in the service of the syncopations of the lives we actually live. But the ways we gather to vote is with our bodies. It’s the dance that goes along with those rhythms.
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