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[...] The mention of the “sabbath day” is presumably supposed to invoke the religious, to introduce the possibility of messianic time instead of mere clock time, but whatever hint of redemption the phrase carries is canceled by “1879,” which here sounds as cold and abstract as “ninety.” [...]

he seems incapable of counting prosodic stresses

[...] a large part of the appeal of the defense as a genre is that it is itself a kind of virtual poetry—it allows you to describe the virtues of poetry without having to write poems that have succumbed to the bitterness of the actual. Which is not to say that defenses never cite specific poems, bu…

Reading in my admittedly desultory way across the centuries

(At the turn of the millennium, when I was the editor of a tiny poetry and art magazine, I would receive a steady stream of submissions—our address was online—from people who had clearly never read our publication but whose cover letters expressed a remarkable desperation to have their poems printe…