On Verse
Best American: Adrienne Rich’s Radical Canonization
When my first undergraduate poetry professor taught “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” and “Diving into the Wreck” side by side, to demonstrate how Rich’s work was transformed by feminism, I marveled how…
6 Writers on the Lasting Influence of Adrienne Rich
Over the course of her long career, Adrienne Rich influenced innumerable poets, critics, editors, feminists and other activists. It would be hard to account for the breadth of it. Since my…
The One Who Find Our Way: Finding My Mother in “Diving into the Wreck”
View image | gettyimages.com In my junior year in college I enrolled in a two-credit course in typesetting. The final project involved hand-setting a poem of our choice. I may…
Coming of Age Through Adrienne Rich
In 1975, when I began my graduate work at a large Midwestern university, Adrienne Rich’s groundbreaking essay collections hadn’t been published yet. That year, my twenty-fourth, had been a watershed….
Call for Submissions: Adrienne Rich Feature
In the March-April 2015 issue The Critical Flame will commemorate the third anniversary of Adrienne Rich’s passing with a special multi-essay feature on her poetry, criticism, feminism, and politics. CF is currently accepting submissions of…
Fluency, Fractures, and Fabrication in Cathy Park Hong
photo by Harold Abramowitz The language spoken in the Desert is an amalgamation of some 300 languages and dialects imported into this country, a rapidly evolving lingua franca. The language,…
Mapping Kei Miller’s Zion
photo by Georgia Popplewell The British Isles are finally taking notice of the young Jamaican poet Kei Miller, whose third book of poems, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way…
I Didn’t Realize I had Written These: Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets
Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets is a landmark collection, central to her mammoth oeuvre, whose reverberations continue to be felt in the contemporary generation of poets. Eschewing the epic accounts, full of…
Claude McKay Walks in Ferguson
Claude McKay addresses the Kremlin, 1922 Claude McKay, born in Jamaica in 1890, is the first modern master of the sonnet form. Yeats of course had turned out a few—one a…