Jim Powell, in the final section of Substrate, itself titled “Substrate,” presents us with moments of apprehending persons from … More

Criticism has one basic task: to explain what is justifiably, rightly extraordinary in a work of literature. This involves making … More

Surfaces are the occasion of Stevens’ poetry; so obvious a statement for a poet among whose best early poems is … More

The obvious question to ask about Jim Powell’s second collection of poems, Substrate, published twenty five years after the first, … More

I’ve tried to work out, in the last five posts, how it is that the most remarkable “Romance” narrative poems … More

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos inspires questions, and is itself the answer to some of the questions; if we feel the … More

Pound felt himself to be in an earthly hell, in the cage in which the Pisan Cantos were written. But … More

There is no sine qua non for poetic success, but it is difficult to imagine making sense of whether a … More

In an earlier post on Song of Solomon I tried to make sense of the presence of melodrama in the … More