The company sold something; Emma didn’t know what. She worked the front desk in the lobby, which had a ceiling that rose to the third floor, late capitalist cathedral-esque. The second and third floors crossed the lobby by catwalk. All day long she listened to boots, heels, flats, and wheels […]
second place One of your early poetry manuscripts won second place in a book contest. It was a step up from being a finalist, you supposed, but when the press offered you a scholarship to a writer’s conference in lieu of publication, you were insulted. You thought you were too […]
It was launched into the night sky on December 3, 2018, the first purely artistic satellite, a Mylar balloon pushed into a cinder-block-sized cell, collapsed upon itself in silent prayer or despair, detained, waiting for release. On December 3, 1800, electors cast equal votes for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron […]
“It was Sappho who first called eros ‘bittersweet.’ No one who has been in love disputes her.” —Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet “It is often called bitter, but it was never bitter enough for me...” —Alexander Chee, “The Poisoning” I. From the Greek glukupikron (literally sweet-bitter), bittersweet has come […]
one-way ticket Poetry is a one-way ticket to the poorhouse, the professor warned us, but he was too late. I’d already boarded the train with my suitcase of iambic aspirations. I’d spent my last penny on a nonrefundable ticket, the cheapest one I could find. I left no breadcrumbs, […]
Poetry Book Review for The Burnings, Gary Worth Moody, Three: A Taos Press, 2019; Girl, Veronica Golos, Three: A Taos Press, 2019. No publisher of poetry does what they do without sacrifice. Andrea Watson, the publisher of Three: A Taos Press, deserves a bow, having just crossed the publishing […]
Berlin, 02 April 2020 Dear Daniel, I think your article is terrific but here’s my issue with it. Admittedly, it is more of an issue with Anglo-American poetry criticism in general, but it’s especially relevant here, since you write about diction. You write about it in a way that […]
Daniel Tiffany’s brilliant provocation and invitation for responses is a welcome gesture to broaden and reanimate ideas about the important and overlooked role of diction in current thinking about poetry and poetics. Ironically, diction has been a central—arguably the central—critical tool in identifying and evaluating African American poetry from the […]
March, 2020 Kāneʻohe, Hawai`i Dear Daniel– Thank you for asking me to respond to your fascinating essay, “Speaking in Tongues: Poetry and the Residues of Shared Language.” Rather selfishly, perhaps, it resonated with me as a kind of manifesto-after-the-fact for Tinfish Press. I founded Tinfish in 1995 as a platform […]
THE POET AS TRANSNATIONAL MESSENGER I had only a few hours to pack and travel out of the collective sacrificing being set up in the UK in the name of elitist liberty and its self-serving dubious ideas of science and applied herd immunity. Everything that has been eroded, taken […]