Poetry has been around most of the century, and people have been complaining about its good old days since before anyone reading this was born. Some people think it’s been going down hill since the …

Books make great holiday gifts. They’re not usually very big or expensive, though they can be both. And they can signal a regard for the receiver’s interests, intelligence, and aesthetic sense.  This sort of multi-level …

So, as you probably know by this point, I have a thing for grunge.  I also have a thing for memory.  My thing for grunge probably stems from the fact that I didn’t really get …

The avant garde has its origins in a longer culture of aesthetic dissidence in the West known as bohemia. It’s a style of life that mixes poverty and snobbery as accessories, flipping between arch taste and low company, …

Reading Spicer this week, again. I realized I’ve been reading The Collected Books on and off since I was nineteen, making for a decade+ now.  And look what it’s done for me! I’ve never once …

The golden age of poetic castration is always well behind us. Even Swinburne was faking it, like in his appropriately titled verse play Chastelard (1865):
They say men dying remember, with sharp joy
And rapid reluctation of …