A Profile of Poet and Critic Dan Chiasson at Harvard Magazine

At Harvard Magazine, Lydialyle Gibson writes about Dan Chiasson's new poetry collection, The Math Campers (Penguin Random House, 2020), whose title sequence was inspired by the poet's firsthand observations of adolescence (via his children), which, like both math camp and poetry, writes Gibson, "implies discipline, but also leisure and creativity." Gibson quotes Chiasson to explain: "We measure out lines and stanzas; we create these ordered environments for ourselves, and then we try to break our own rules." Another thread running through this collection is the poet's "continual fixation on time":

Chiasson’s poetry plays relentlessly with time, and this book does too. Moments that seem linear turn out to be cyclical—“That’s how I’ve always experienced time,” he says. “It’s something I’ve found to be uncanny about having children.” Pieces of the past keep reappearing, sometimes out of the blue, cracked and askew. And all the while, the math campers are working toward an equation to make the summer last forever: “how the summer might expand / and prove eternal by division” (“Which is eerie to think about now,” Chiasson adds, amid the pandemic’s limbo).

Learn more at Harvard Magazine.