Some 600 years later, Margery Kempe’s disquieting sobs continue to confound and provoke.
Mark Scroggins
Mark Scroggins is a poet, biographer, and critic. His recent books include the poetry collection Pressure Dressing, the essay collection The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry, and a selection of the erotic poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, and Manhattan.
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Making Poetry From Mallarmé’s Mistakes
Ellen Dillon’s verdict on Mallarmé’s pedagogical text? Pretty shaky.
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British Poetry’s New Avant-Garde
British poetry is really as energetic and varied as its American counterpart.
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Poetry at the Intersection of Art and Twitter
The poems in Ken Babstock’s Swivelmount convey a sense that the whole truth of reality is tantalizingly just beyond one’s grasp.
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Douglas Kearney’s Poetry of Performance
Kearney’s language — exquisitely torqued and modulated, sheering from the formal to the vernacular — reminds us that we are in the hands of a masterful performer.
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A Poet of Isolation and Uncertainty
The poems in Jean Day’s Late Human carry a sense of having arrived at a moment when nothing feels quite right.
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Poetry as the “Art of Thinking It Through”
The linguistic imagination of William Fuller’s new collection, Daybreak, takes the form of sustained odysseys between philosophical abstraction and the everyday concrete.
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Don Mee Choi’s Language of History
Just as collage artists might paste a scrap of newsprint or a piece of rattan chair-bottom to their canvas, documentary poets form their poetic work from public records, firsthand accounts, and newspaper reports.
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Poems in the Language of Death
Paul Celan’s truest homeland, paradoxically, was the German language — the language of the Nazis who imprisoned him in a forced labor camp and murdered his parents.
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A New, Feminist Translation of Beowulf
Maria Dahvana Headley’s breathtakingly audacious and idiomatically rich Beowulf: A New Translation is a breath of iconoclastically fresh air blowing through the old tale’s stuffy mead-hall atmosphere.
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Marcella Durand’s Apocalyptic Pastoral
Durand’s urban environment in The Prospect is a source not of solace but of anxiety.