To begin this post, I want to draw attention to Frank’s post “Just Make It Go Away,” which highlights the way that Morrison and Dante both use blindness as a way to describe some of their major characters. The article that Frank brings into his post, “On the Hideous Whiteness of Brexit,” points specifically to the distorting lens that having wh…[Read more]

I first want to talk about what Audre Lorde might think of an image and want to relate it back to Ezra Pound’s idea of an image as an emotional complex. In the essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury*,” Lorde follows this thread by stating that “it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about…[Read more]

I honestly don’t know what it is, but I keep finding connections between the stuff that we talk about in class and the things that I’m reading on the side. To be more specific, I’m currently reading a book of poetry called The New Testament by Jericho Brown, a well-known contemporary poet who talks about race.

The book is a journey of one…[Read more]

I just read “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates… it’s such a well-written, informative piece about what our next steps should be as Americans. It goes deep into our history and highlights specific examples of how we have neglected rights that our Constitution grants. The reading isn’t tough. It moves back and forth through time often,…[Read more]

So I recently read F(X), a poem by Annalise Lozier, published in The Kenyon Review, which works to create images so fluidly that I was moved. Lines like “I have a sore spot / on each side of my head where our […]

So since my most recent blog post about narrative poetry, I thought about the different kinds of narratives that we each day. Now I know that many of us read and indulge stories all around us, but I want to call attention to some recent stories that have been percolating our nation’s media. There’s so much going on around us. We’re all sensitive…[Read more]

A thank you to Kallie for introducing me to the light, pillowy poetry that Mary Oliver makes room for in our chaotic world. I read it about three times a day, at least. It gives me a minute to breath and realize […]

Recently, I’ve been questioning my role as a writer. The work that I thrive doing, what I define as prose, usually consists of me telling a story or deliberating on an argument. I wondered how the form that I love so much could translate into poetry, or rather, writing that pays much more attention to sound and shape on the page. Since narratives…[Read more]

After listening to A Tribe Called Quest’s most recent album, We The People, I began thinking of my role as a poet in today’s world. It’s not the first time I thought about the position we all have as artists — where do we fit? — but I have placed myself within the binaries of what I’m allowed.

I feel that my little planet is pronounced by…[Read more]

I found the fact that Morrison includes Patricia as a kind of oral historian in Paradise to be jarring considering the fact that I worked at a museum which created a project that recorded the histories of people who are of mixed descent. I wanted to do some work addressing the parallels between Patricia and the work that Brooklyn Historical…[Read more]

Please take the time to read this essay, “Making America White Again,” by the author of our class’s readings, Toni Morrison. She talks about a push and pull: the whitening of America. The topic she discusses makes […]

I woke up today disoriented, unable to think clearly about our country’s future. Yesterday, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States. America has spoken. Although this means that many o […]

Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer and activist that fights for what goes unnoticed in our justice system. But alongside this, Stevenson works to reteach American history… Stevenson forces his audience to remember the […]

A couple weeks ago, I asked Lytton about how to concisely produce sound in poetry and his advice garnered an intimate approximation to the words that you choose and how they relate to one another in a line. He […]

I wanted to start a conversation about prisons in the United States. But first, I’d like to start with a little anecdote. A couple years ago my older brother used to hang around the wrong group of people. We live in the hood in Brooklyn and so part of this meant dealing with the culture of the hood. One day, my brother was hanging out with these…[Read more]