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 […]
POETRY UNDER LOCKDOWN (A Response to Daniel Tiffany’s “Speaking in Tongues: Poetry and the Residues of Shared Language”) As I sit down to write something in response to Daniel Tiffany’s essay, “Speaking in Tongues,” we’re entering the isolating days of the Covid-19 crisis. News of exponential increases in the […]
Begin before the beginning. As an epigraph to their recent collection Space Struck, Paige Lewis offers this passage from Book XIV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: So while they journeyed up that sloping road, the Sibyl told her story to Aeneas; they exited the underworld at Cumae, and there Aeneas offered customary […]
A LITTLE STROLL AROUND THE SOUND Content enough– the shredded shirt you stir into the paper mix, the red dirt in the rubric’s raw. From the start the artist in me yearned to blow up letters– zoom way into them, past legibility’s franchise. It tore into their tucked beds, […]
Mike Chasar is the author of Poetry Unbound: Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram (Columbia UP, 2020) and Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (Columbia UP, 2012). A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the […]
I, admittedly, do not know exactly what the lyric is. As one entrance, perhaps just for myself alone, I’m thinking what things, other than poetry, get described as ‘lyric’. How, for instance, one might describe music without a vocalist as ‘lyric’ when it follows some general tendencies of sung melody: […]
Some Questions about the Use of Diction in Poetry Daniel’s excellent essay makes possible many further thoughts, for which I’m very grateful. In particular, for me, it raised these very preliminary questions. What may poems do to or with the dialectics, vocabularies, and languages which they incorporate, and what may […]