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This density is what makes poetry a literature, which is to say it cannot exist without roots, without knowledge of earlier bodies of poetic expression. This is why when “Instapoetry” proudly declares itself a form of unknowing, it denies itself the power of the thing it claims to be. When the Inst…

These are lines from a lyric known as “Fragment 47” composed by the poet Sappho who lived in the late seventh century BC at Mytilene, the largest city on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. In the poet Anne Carson’s translation, this is how it reads:

Eros shook my
mind like a mountain w…

It’s like a jungle sometimes . . . He is the savage. He is beastmode, paradoxically subliterate and over-articulate, overspeaking and overlaying official thinking and bien-pensant consideration, hyperfleshed and hypersexed, his self-flagellation and his private inferno conducted in public, like a h…

Even within poems packed with dross, he’ll find his way to something, to a moment you won’t forget.

George Herriman was a New Orleans Creole, and the comedy has a laconic Southern charm to its arrangement