I’m delighted to have “c o n t e m p o r a n e i t y,” “Silence,” and “Blason IV,” poems from my current project, Postrock, in the first issue of Version (9) (Summer 2021), a magazine exploring theory in contemporary poetry.
Contemporary Poetry
“2016.29” and “2016.30” in Matter
“2016.29” and “2016.30,” more sonnets from my ongoing sequence, have been published in issue 29 of Matter.
“2019.03” in Pine Hills Review
Untitled, by Courtney Bernardo
Another sonnet from my ongoing sequence, “2019.03,” is in the Pine Hills Review.
Spring 2020 Links (Pre-COVID-19)
A lot of stuff was going on for me this year, both personally and professionally, so I haven’t really had a chance to post links since . . . last summer (!), nine months before the global pandemic was declared. So, to catch up: here’s links from late summer 2019–March 11, 2020 that are, by the very nature of posting them now, rather outdated/anachronistic, a window onto a world that is gone yet still all too present (and excessive), a world that most certainly wasn’t going in the direction of human flourishing and that any nostalgia for may be misplaced. . . . I hope to have “Links in the Time of Coronavirus, Vol. 1” up sometime soon(er than nine months from now . . .).
Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say” (February 20, 2020).
Nuclear and Environmental
Mary Hudetz, “US Official: Research Finds Uranium in Navajo Women, Babies.”
David E. Sanger and Andrew E. Kramer, “US Officials Suspect New Nuclear Missile in Explosion That Killed Seven Russians.”
Kristin George Bagdanov, “Addressing the Atomic Specter: Ginsberg’S ‘Plutonian Ode’ and America’s Nuclear Unconscious.”
Alyssa Battistoni, “Why Naomi Klein Has Been Right.”
Henry Fountain, “Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change.”
Spring Semester 2020: Syllabi
This spring, I’m teaching two brand new courses at Hartwick College: a writing-intensive course covering the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, and Claudia Rankine; and a senior seminar on John Ashbery. Lots of great poetry! The syllabi:
ENGL 247 Four Modern American Poets: Rich, Lorde, Myles, and Rankine
Some Links on the Current Debate About Contemporary Poetry
The July 2013 issue of Harper’s has an article that has sparked considerable amounts of debate in the world of contemporary poetry. Mark Edmundson’s “Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Verse” is being widely responded to. (There’s a link, but you need a subscription or to pick up an actual copy of the magazine.) A smattering of links:
Ron Charles immediately reported on Edmundson’s polemic in The Washington Post with “Why is Modern Poetry So Bad?” (Though his use of “modern” in the title probably signals a certain ignorance of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry . . . .)
The University of Pittsburgh’s own Dawn Lundy Martin has weighed in with “In Defense of-.”
The Hyperarchival Parallax 