Notes on Craft and Failure April 26, 2013: The techne of the builder, the craftsperson, the designer, is measurable and finite, at least at a certain basic level that defines minimal competence. One important historical criterion for poetic craft has been facility in metrical control combined with syntactical suppleness. E.g., a Greek ode in quantitative measure: if one foot is [...] by K. Silem Mohammad

This Lower World April 19, 2013: [caption id="attachment_65443" align="alignright" width="500"] Book XII of William Blake’s 1808 Paradise Lost.[/caption] This week I’ve been thinking about the moment in Book XI of Paradise Lost when Milton’s Eve laments to Adam, when the angel Michael has arrived to dispossess them of Paradise: How shall I part and wither wander [...] by Camille Guthrie

Writing Poetry about Art April 12, 2013: I’m a member of the tribe who likes to write poetry about art. The first moment of ekphrastic poetry we have comes from Homer when he halts the battle action in The Illiad to describe the stunning Shield of Achilles. The most well-known ekphrastic poem is of course Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which he uses the fabulously-named term, [...] by Camille Guthrie

CodeUnknown: Reading Writing April 11, 2013: [caption id="attachment_64648" align="alignright" width="500"] Albert York, Flying Figure, oil on canvas, circa 1968, 14 x 13 in. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska-Lincoln[/caption] Christopher Ricks’s Keats and Embarrassment and Robert Gittings’s John Keats: The Living Year are like good slide lectures on the poet and [...] by Bill Berkson

Bringing John Wieners Back: Revisiting 707 Scott Street April 2, 2013: In 2001 I printed a small book, Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners, an outtake from my thesis for the Poetics Program at New College of California. I wanted it to look like a mini-manifesto, a small pamphlet reminiscent of Walter Jackson Bates’s Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats-- something that could pass as [...] by Micah Ballard

Did Keats Get It All Wrong? November 14, 2012: That's what David Orrell thinks, over at the Huffington Post. He's, of course, referring to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where Keats writes: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." His discussion begins by laying out a classical definition of beauty and connecting the definition to [...] by Harriet Staff

Ladies, Fifty Shades of Grey has NOTHING on This: Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Keats October 19, 2012: Fellow poetry lovers and "Cumberbitches": Let us give hearty thanks to Poetry International Web Magazine for posting this YouTube video of Benedict Cumberbatch (of BBC's "Sherlock Holmes") reading John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" on their Facebook page. Keats has never sounded so eloquent, so mellifluous, so...unbelievably sexy. Says the [...] by Harriet Staff

Keats was an Opium Addict September 24, 2012: Or so Nicholas Roe, author of a new Keats autobiography, says. From The Guardian: John Keats, the poet of "beauty", a devotee of aesthetic isolation who swooned at the thought of his so-called "bright star" Fanny Brawne and succumbed to TB when he was 25, was an opium addict. The claim is made in a new biography, to be published [...] by Harriet Staff

No Longer Out of Print! W. J. Bate’s Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats July 30, 2012: HEY KEATS FANS! Keep your eyes out for this book, we'd say. Long out of print, but not for long, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats by Walter Jackson Bate is coming soon in a new edition from Contra Mundum Press, with an introduction from Italian poet, playwright, translator, and critic Maura Del Serra. The book should be [...] by Harriet Staff

The Huffington Post invites you to play Rate! That! Prodigy! March 2, 2011: In The Huffington Post's continued domination of the phlisticle genre (that's the combination of a photo gallery and listicle, which is already a combination of list and article, for those of you keeping track at home), today they present ten literary prodigies. Citing a quote from Fran Liebowitz in which she claimed that literary prodigies [...] by Harriet Staff