In the wee hours of the morning, with the DIAGRAM magazine tab open in my browser, I surf the magazine’s current issue, absorbing each pixel of avant-garde poems and clicking rapidly between diagrams. Besides my unequivocal love for the concept DIAGRAM pushes—“odd but good”— oozing from the crisp white and…
Tag: Poetry
An ode to Jim Harrison By Sten Spinella
Jim Harrison died on Saturday, March 26th, 2016. Don’t let the innocuous name fool you; Harrison was an extraordinary man. For those who watch the show Californication, consider Harrison, who spent a portion of his career in Hollywood working on screenplays, a more talented Hank Moody with a blind left…
MFA—Recipe For Success or Disaster? By Kate Monica
“Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?” —Chang-rae Lee, On Such A Full Sea Getting an MFA seems like the natural progression for any English major looking to take a swing at making a career of writing….
Francis Ponge: Things, Doodads, and Whatchamacallits by Nicholas DiBenedetto
*Author’s Note: I’d like to thank Darcie Dennigan for introducing me to Francis Ponge and his poems, and Kerry Carnahan, Shannon Hearn, Emily Kraus, Erin Lynn, Eleanor Reeds, Matthew Ryan, and Brian Sneeden for engaging in an insightful discussion of selected works to help me form opinions on, and better…
Remembering Robert Frost by Emily Cantor
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life — It goes on.” —Robert Frost Today marks the 142nd birthday of the American poet Robert Lee Frost. Though Frost is most famous for his depictions of rural New England life, he was actually born in San Francisco….
“Striking Prayer’s Attitude:” A Dalliance with the Poetry of Carl Phillips by Nicholas DiBenedetto
“Sometimes the thought that I’m doomed / to fail – that the body is – keeps me almost steady,” – Carl Phillips Thus writes Carl Phillips in “Stray,” one of two recent pieces by the poet that have appeared in the March 2016 issue of Poetry. Indeed, the flux between…
A review of Richard Siken’s War of the Foxes by Kate Monica
“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. It’s not like a tree where the roots have to…
America’s Great Black Hope by Sten Spinella
I’ve been doing some thinking on Kendrick Lamar lately. His new album, untitled unmastered is great, but that is to be expected. I don’t have any more to say on it than your average music reviewer does. I want to get into something different. I want to address the fact…
The Threat of an Empty Page By Emily Zimmer
“I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.” — Charles Krauthammer The vast emptiness of the page is overwhelming. The stark white seems…
Does Anyone Really Know What Alt-Lit is? by Alexandra Cichon
My freshman year of college, spring semester 2013, I found myself standing on a rooftop in Brooklyn with people I didn’t know. What we did have in common was our ability to Instagram the Manhattan skyline and our following of alt-lit, or Alternative Literature. The semester before, I had discovered…