Articles - July 2015

Andrée Chedid and the alchemy of poetry

« Les vivants » (“The Living”) is the second sequence in the poetry triptych that comprises Andrée Chedid’s 1956 work, Terre et poésie (Earth and Poetry).

a.rawlings: Ecopoetic intersubjectivity

a.rawlings at Swartifoss, Iceland.

In a recent essay, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist who is a member of the Potawatomi tribe (one of the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe peoples of North America), recounts being stunned when she learned of the word puhpowee from an ethnobotanical study on traditional Anishinaabe uses of fungi.

'It Wasn't a Dream, It Was a Flood'

Approaching realness in Frank Stanford

Frank Stanford is an anachronism in late twentieth-century poetry. Like many of his southern contemporaries, much of his work is driven by a narrative impulse — his poems nearly always have stable, embodied speakers; they tend to use fairly normative syntax; they generally feel grounded in a particular geographic location; and they’re concerned with identity, memory, and depicting external action.