In Sitwell’s “Hornpipe,” we find “Lady Venus on the settee of the horsehair sea.” But Queen Victoria arrives on an iceberg, Venus becomes a “shady lady,” and the queen at the end calls strong drink “not the goods for me.” This anti-climax makes the poem better by modulating tone.

Reading metrical poetry requires attention to rhythm. Shakespeare composed sonnets in iambic pentameter but exceptions enhance the artistry. Note the spondees in Sonnet 1 “bright eyes” and “sweet self, breaking the flow of verse to reinforce the object of the poem’s self-regard.

Material things within poems trigger memories but can first evoke other objects. In D.H. Lawrence’s “Sorrow,” a “grey strand” of cigarette smoke reminds him of “grey hairs” he finds on his coat. Smoke and hair together create an evocative scene of memory.

Tiny poems have their own charm. Let’s look at one by Joel Oppenheimer: they have returned the wrong letter. Notice the line break between “wrong” and “letter.” Oppenheimer makes us pause here. The wrong what? So we’re left to wonder for an instant what’s being returned.

When Rev. John Hale in The Crucible comes to Salem to join the court investigating witchcraft, he brings “a half-dozen heavy books.” “Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated,” he says. It’s not just a play about mass hysteria but also the use of writing.

It’s hard to disentangle Sylvia Plath’s poetry from her biography. But we needn’t even if we could. Look at the beginning of “The Night Dances”: A smile fell in the grass. Irretrievable! Picture this. The unique metaphor and the feeling state it produces make it timeless.

“Caedmon’s Hymn” sounds a bit flat in modern English translation in part because it’s hard to translate the poem’s rhythm and alliterations. But context is key. Caedmon composed this as a song rather than a poem to be read. Hearing this as music brings it to life.

In Carew’s “Give Me More Love, Or More Disdain,” the speaker rejects any “temperate” middle ground and wants to know where he stands in a relationship: “crown my joys or cure my pain.” It seems a reasonable question. But don’t actually try it. This is poetry not life advice.

Sherman Alexie tends to be underrated as a poet. In “Terminal Nostalgia,” he begins with the following two lines, The music of my youth was much better Than the music of yours. So was the weather. When is nostalgia a competition? Is it always?

Everyday objects in poetry can bring high flown rhetoric home. Notice the “peach-colored funny papers” and the “dashboard . . . gnome” in John Ashbery’s “Wakefulness.”

Margaret Atwood’s “Bored” asks us to confront “All those times I was bored / out of my mind.” Imagery brings us out of it. “The worn gunwales” of a boat, “the intricate twill of the seat / cover . . . the granular / pink rock . . . “sea-fans / of dry moss.” She takes us there.

In Thomas Wyatt’s “The Long Love,” a woman teaches a man to suffer unrequited. It ends with resignation: “For good is the life ending faithfully.” Keep in mind that since the woman cannot be obtained in courtly love, the situation begins to resemble religious devotion.

For Freud, truce with the superego brings a measure of freedom. We often imagine it as the voice of the father. But in Charles Bukowski’s poem “Three Oranges,” doing away with the father mocks the speaker of the poem: “I say kill the Father / before he makes more / such as / I.”

Poems that reference their own composition can get tedious. Not so with Ammons’s “Garbage”: “are you writing the great poem / the world’s waiting for: don’t you know you / have an unaccomplished mission unaccomplished.” The title works by ironizing the speaker’s grandiosity.

Is the act of naming violence? It’s debatable, but Frank Bidart makes an argument for this view. “War without end,” he repeats in his poem “Injunction,” “to name is to possess,” it “offend[s],” while “refusing to name . . . welcomes all.”

Compare two lines from Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew”: “The trees of the mind are black” and “The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right.” The first a metaphor, the second resits symbolization. We move between the literal and the figurative, which brings poetry to life.

Margaret Atwood’s “Bored” asks us to confront “All those times I was bored / out of my mind.” Imagery brings us out of it. “The worn gunwales” of a boat, “the intricate twill of the seat / cover . . . the granular / pink rock . . . “sea-fans / of dry moss.” She takes us there.

Pleased to report that my article "Faulkner's Material Texts" is now up on the Cambridge University Press website! Faulkner’s Material Texts - Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press (cambridgeblog.org)

Great students this semester in my humanities class. Never know how things will go in an intensive summer course, but we're working our way thought some great art and literature!

Reading C.A. Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914. Amazing book in that it takes a multi-nodal approach drawing connections between different political, economic, and intellectual movements around the world.