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I think if we are being honest, we probably would admit that at times we fear there is an unbridgeable gap between us and others—readers, friends, family, partners—that language cannot cross. Or maybe we fear the gap is in fact bridgeable by someone less damaged or more talented or attractive or au…

I think this is one reason why Ashbery is often thought of as difficult or elusive. It can seem to readers either like there is nothing there, or that they are missing something. “The poem is sad, because it wants to be yours, and cannot,” he writes in another poem, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” which…

Free verse and rhyming poetry are often said to be in opposition. But, really, they are just different versions of what poetry does. Just as a rhyming poem is built up out of a pattern of repeating end sounds, in some pattern or even irregularly, a poem can rhyme conceptually: that is, through idea…

In one of Dickinson’s oft-quoted poems, “Hope” is defined as “the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” A “thing with feathers” is, of course, a bird. But saying it that way, as if it is unfamiliar, and needs to be described again, causes us to rethink those qualities of a bird that rese…

According to Shklovsky, artistic texts use the exact same language as texts designed primarily to convey information, but do something different with it. The specific mechanism by which language becomes not merely a conduit to convey meaning, but something more, is called, in Russian, “ostraneniye,…