Kent Shaw's Blog, page 8

Friday Shoutout!!

Ecopoetics and Nature Poetry Published in the 21st Century

The ecopoetic criticism I have read is mainly concerned with shifting the conversation people have about nature poetry so it accounts for the anthropocene. But I wonder what to do about poetry drawing on nature as an unconventional logic. Kind of like Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992). How the poet keeps viewing the house from the perspective of her garden, even taking on the voice of natural objects so she can make sense of the tragedy happening inside. Conceivably, Gluck’s book was before the term “anthropocene” was coined. But two books I’ve read recently were published in the 2010s. And I wonder how ecopoetics might fit into how I read them.

Is it possible for nature to occupy a poetic authority, or lend itself to a poet as an authoritative guide? In Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Headwaters (Norton, 2014) or Emily Pittinos’s The Last Unkillable Thing (University of Iowa Press, 2021), the poetry relies on nature as a reference point. Like there’s a logic to nature that helps Voigt sort through the mortal dimensions to a long marriage, or they help PIttinos acknowledge grief after losing her father. In the introduction to Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne’s book, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field (University of Iowa Press, 2018), they describe an “ethical relationship” between people and nature, with a fairly open-ended application. It can hold true, for instance, whether the poet is aligning themselves more closely to nature, or the poet is offering some systemic critique of capitalism versus nature, or the poet is remarking on impending apocalypse as a result of human influence on nature for how that might relate to. Perhaps this is the conjunction between ecopoetics and these two contemoprary books by Pittinos and Voigt. It still feels like something’s missing. And I guess what my fundamental concern is that a poetry looking to nature as some spiritual guide is outdated, or it’s relying on a conventional poetic move. And while I can see how ecopoetics say it’s just offering better methods for reading certain kinds of poetry, I feel like these two books should be helped by an ecopoetic read, and I’m not sure yet how to do that.

Upcoming Releases

Two books I’m excited about for the future: Stella Corso’s Green Knife is coming out from Rescue Press some time this year. And, given the work I saw last year in an issue of FENCE, I think it’s going to be fun! I mean, truth be told, the FENCE work led me to her book, Tantrum (Rescue Press, 2017), which was very funny. So I think that will be exciting. And then my wife, Carrie Oeding, also has a new book coming out from Akron. I’ve been there while she’s been writing If I Could Give You a Line (University of Akron Press, 2023), and I can state with authority and unqualified affection for the poet, it’s a super book!!

A Really Wow Project

Ghost Proposal has three poets on their masthead: Nora Claire Miller, Kelly Clare, and Alyssa Moore. All three I’ve come across in my lit journal reading. All three with spectacular poems. I am just electric to see what happens in their hands. And though I should be ashamed to admit this, I refresh on the web site often, eager for what might appear!

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My Dream AWP Panel

I’ll admit, I’ve submitted multiple panel proposals to AWP, and they’ve all been rejected. Maybe it’s because I can never come up with a pithy panel title. Or maybe it’s that writing the panel description has felt like old Twitter, where you had just 140 characters. And I want to include all the things I find interesting. And in the process I make it sound senseless. Maybe the title for this dream panel could be something about subverting minimalism. Or maturing the lyrical narrative. Or muscular enjambment. I really don’t know. I’ve thought, though, it would be interesting to come up with a few questions I could pretend to ask each of these poets. And maybe some thoughts for why those questions would be of interest.

Panel Attendees Paired with One of Their Books for DiscussionMidwood (Norton, 2022), by Jana PrikrylA Piece of Good News (FSG, 2020), by Katie PetersonFablesque (Tupelo Press, 2019), by Anna Maria HongPale Colors in a Tall Field (FSG, 2020), by Carl PhillipsPanel Questions1. How do you use brevity or containment to your advantage?

There are many different ways to use brevity in a poem. There is the incidental poem, where the poet describes a brief interaction they had with something imaginative. And the poems uses exaggeration or understatement to mark the enormity of this moment, ultimately commenting, perhaps, on the inadequacy of language to in any way address reality. There are the short, impressionistic poems, where the length is punctuated so quickly by the conclusion, showing how fleeting reality can be. I don’t know that a catalogue of the many different ways brevity benefits a poem is possible. Or another catalogue of the ways brevity can assert itself as something the reader should reckon with. Like how I’m still reckoning with Noah Eli Gordon’s A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007). Do I read each page as a short burst? A light touch?

The books I would have to this panel are doing nothing like this, though. In Prikryl, the poem is interested in elaborating a scene and then discovering for the reader a fairly specific emotion laying at the heart of the scene or situation. The setting for the poem feels expansive, when, in fact, the poem is this efficient engine of language quickly expanding its position on the page. In Phillips, the poem lays out an emotional complexity articulated further and further, until it’s unclear whether the poem is about a larger emotion like disappointment or the particular way resignation can deepen that disappointment. For all these books, I find brevity contributes to the poems’ surprise. I get lost in the their discursive sentiment, not even realizing how quickly the poems gather their material. And then exit.

2. How would you describe the relationship between individual poems in the collection and the larger context tying them together?

Though this larger context is what I generally read for in books of poems, I find these four books especially involved with an overarching sensibility. There is an unmistakably larger whole enveloping each poem. The Anna Maria Hong might be the easiest illustration of this, as the book’s Fablesque title signals its interest in fables. Additionally, there is the theme of family casting a shadow over the book, with her first poem and its brief family portrait (revealing both who the family is and what the poet thinks of them). It would be interesting to hear how Hong characterizes the intentional sequencing of the poems versus individual poems offering a more general gesture with that larger context. Personally, I find her transition from one poem to the next evoking a more specific and associative relationship intent on sequence. But I wonder how she would talk about it.

The Column, by Hubert Robert

In contrast, I would say Phillips and Peterson feel more like an extravagance of mind or a vast painting that’s more about thinking than thinking about one thing in particular. Ordering of the poems might matter, but it’s more about a general interaction with with a thematic sensibility. Like this painting on the right from the St. Louis Art Museum. For me, it’s never been a painting of a column (though it’s called The Columm), but instead a painting of all that sky, the light illuminating everything, that ideally temperate day, given how comfortable the people look dressed like that. The column operates for me as a foil rather than a central subject. So where Phillips might be writing about disappointment, and Peterson about temporality, those feelings are more the occasion to look at all the ways these sentiments influence their world. The poets are accounting for lifetimes of experience that warrant as much consideration as any thematic center.

Granted, this “larger context” I’m writing about is mostly about how it feels to me reading a book of poems. There is a presence connecting the work together. And I have a hard time actually identifying the source of that presence. I was reading Paul de Man’s “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” and he talked about reading “an intellectual assurance of affirmation” in Baudelaire’s “Correspondance,” how that tone alone is what lends the work a poetic authority. For me, these four books have that “intellecutal assurance,” but I’m not sure they’re interested in “affirmation.” They’re more tentative or inquisitive about the poems’ circumstance, more tender than “affirming.” But, at the same time, the poems are “assured” they have something to say. I like to think of the authority as a sensibility rooted in the poet. Something biographically significant to each of their lives but not needing to be biographically accurate to be true. Because the confidence and complexity of voice makes the poems feel true.

3. How would you describe the role of closure and brevity in your book?

I have a long fascination with Lyn Hejinian’s essay, “The Rejection of Closure” (from The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000)) And all the ways it might mean “opening” a poem. Or softening the conclusion. Or subverting the conclusiveness of the conclusion. Or stopping the poem far short of a “conclusion,” because beginning and ending are so arbitrary. I am someone who reads poems for the pleasure of closure as much as an impatience when the poem’s closure is too tidy. Though a tidy ending can still be admirable in its expert execution.

I say all this, because it felt for many years that a poet was in the wrong place if they spoke favorably of closure in their work. Even poets whose work thrived from the poem’s ending would have rather said they saw their poems at least resisting the moment of closure. It’s like that Natasha Saje essay, “Why Must It Always End This Way” (from Windows and Doors (University of Michigan Press, 2014)), where she argues that Philip Levine’s narrative poetry is actually very discontinuous and fragmented. I like the argument, and I can see how true it is for a lot of narrative poetry. And I recognize the argument is mainly about recognizing the complexity attributed to non-narrative poetry as a quality equally present in narrative poetry, with Saje working the assumption that fragmented poems must necessarily be complex. But I don’t personally feel scattered reading Levine’s poems. And I’m much more interested in whatever the magic quality is that inhabits a narrative poem. How I can be absorbed by the story and not feel the more tense work of language. Like I would rather narrative paper over the gaps than dwell on why the gaps are there.

All of this to say, I would hope that a question about closure in these poems, especially how closure might emphasize or distract from the poem’s brevity, could be considered without the need to “reject closure” as a rule. All of these poems lead their reader to complexity. They are not predictable, like that strain of 90s poetry that made it feel like reading the poem was just useless. Maybe that uselessness was why they were so obsessed with poetry “mattering.”

This dream panel of poets, though, has such a variety of closure. For instance, Phillips’s poems, that often feel so aware of their destination. But then each image, each obsevation, is him avoiding that ending. And the poet will try denying to himself that’s where he’s going. But the poem is leading him there nevertheless. And it’s this crucible of indeterminate motives that helps him refine what he actually thinks of the ending that was supposed to be inevitable. What is ending, then, for Carl Phillips? And conversely what is ending for Jana Prikryl, whose poems feel so formally contained? To the extent I would describe them as an encapsulation. An evocative scene or idea that quickly develops on the page, but it doesn’t signal what about it is driving the poem forward. How does closure work in these poems? And, yes, I recognize I’m leading her to explain to me why I find these poems’ ending so striking. How sudden and conclusive. And I would be curious to hear how she characterizes that quality.

4. If you considered your poem a sculpture, what material would the sculpture be made of?

I’ll admit this question mainly comes from the sensation reading Jana Prikryl’s book. The poems feel so formed. And then I watched a video where Cornelia Parker describes marble sculptures as a series of many violent acts to the marble. Something about Prikryl’s work felt like a marble sculpture, with all those smooth marble lines concealing the coarse and refined revisionary gestures necessary to shape that smoothness. What material would she compare her poems to? Something hard? Malleable? And when I think of the variety among these four books, how I read similar methods of composition (or similar enough to make an interesting conversation among these four poets), I anticipate both intersections and contrasts illuminating their poetry further.

So how would these poets envision their work as a 3-dimensional object? What material? And by material I’m thinking of both traditional and nontraditional work. One sculpture I’ve long admired is by Tara Donovan. The untitled piece, pictured below, is surprisingly elegant, given its a lattice of styrofoam drinking cups.

Untitled, by Tara Donovan

Perhaps this question is the most selfish of the four questions. And ultimately I think my selfishness is what undermines any of my AWP Panel Proposals. I’m too eager to hear about the relationship a poet has with their poems—a line of inquiry that encourages idiosyncrosy and individual perspective rather than collective interactions with a consensus among the panelists. I would like to think, though, that as each of these poets considers the material or materials they would use for the “sculpture” of their poem, they would discover among one another what makes each of their poems a substantive whole. Some invented material binding the language so it stood on the page or floated, as Donovan’s untitled sculpture appears to do. As I’ve observed, all four poets’ work appears spare on the page. Nodding to minimailism. But only minimally. So how aware do these poets feel the poems are of their brief interaction with language? How do they see this particular material accounting for that brevity, and how does that brevity substantiate such a moment to themselves.

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“Down by the Sea,” by Max Winter

I know Alice Notley isn’t the only person to write about the relationship between “line” and “sentence,” but I have always appreciated the illustrations she uses in her essay, “American Poetic Music at the Present Moment.” (found in Coming After (University of Michigan Press, 2005)) For a long time, I don’t think I was a very good reader of, say, Eileen Myles’s poems, because I am so easily seduced by Notley’s involved lines amassing so much imaginative energy. I like getting lost in the poetic line. Or immersed. And I really like having Notley, a poet so interested in the longer line (at least in her books from the 1990s on), teach me how to read someone like Myles.

And even though Max Winter’s lines in “Down by the Sea” aren’t about the quick-change line break, or the chopped-up completed or incompleted sentence stretching over many lines, there is something notable about the rhythm occurring at each line break. Or would it be more appropriate to call it a tempo? I am just really taken by the poem’s investment in the poetic line as a unit (Winter even signals this by doing the conventional capitalization at the start of each line), and how subtly Winter shifts or morphs the task for that unit. Should the lines be read as a catalogue? So that “The teased knot in the vapor over the kettle” is equivalent to “Do you pray we ask when it is serious”? I think it’s a possible read for the poem.

Because the poem is highlighting how all “these things / Make a song a register too high to hear”. And it’s that overarching song the poem hears on behalf of its reader that adds this layer I’m proposing—a layer tha sits alongside the other layers, like “air inside this room [that] does not change.” Or a daily history towering over the poet and blessing the poet. And all of it in this steady and assured poetic voice.

Useful LinksDown by the Sea, available online for your reading pleasure!Bennington Review 10, the issue where the poem appears.Solid Objects, the press where Winter is co-editor

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from Time Is an Indecipherable Text, by Lauri Garcia Dueñas

I appreciate the immediacy of Dueñas characterization of a city–its chaos, a many-armed chaos, or a many-ways-visited-upon-the-poet chaos. And it’s for multiple reasons this chaos exists. Like, um, a city is just chaotic by nature. Consider construction of anything, the serpentine relationship between rebar and concrete. The serpent-like relationship when a person is wandering the city. And maybe this chaos is by design: “there’s a dialogue of thought between great men who chew up kites who exercise their power to be everywhere at once.”

And it’s like, “Exactly.” That’s the city. It exists and it’s existing to be a state of mind that keeps edging into the poet’s state of mind. And to what effect?

For me, this is the poem’s magic. The chaos of a mind, the first-person account living within that mind, and how, then, to navigate the city, which has its own mind. Perhaps my reading here reveals the kind of chaos intertwined with the city’s chaos. And the poem complements this formally with prose poetry shifting from bold text (even larger-font text) and normal text weight. I like the crafted claustrophobia of the poem. And amongst this pressure the poet forms her desires. And her rights to form personal desires.

Helpful LinksLauri Garcia Dueñas Home PageBOMB Summer 2022 issue

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“New Apartments,” by Jana Prikryl

As I describe in my goodreads review of Prikryl’s book, Midwood (Norton, 2022), the poems have this remarkably swift practice of establishing their primary concern, or their narrative setting. For instance, in her poem, “Field Trip,” she quickly positions the awkward and slightly alienating position a parent has on a field trip with her child,. How it feels a bit foreign, but also has this sense of social belonging. At its heart, I read “Field Trip” as a lyrical narrative poem leading the reader to a very set and reflective conclusion.

“New Apartments” distinguishes itself from other poems in the book because it’s more explicitly political. Or, for my reading, the final image presents the speaker in a precariously political light. There is a hill where low-income apartments have been built, and people in the village are having to acknowledge “the poor living among us now.” How to account for these “tidy boxlike houses” and their conspicuous presence?

What is the politics of a situation like this? I think the poem endeavors to run the poet’s contradictory thoughts alongside one another using an image. The cold winter. The “pathways coated in a thickness of ice,” so that even as she looked at that path’s gravel, she would likely not have a sure footing herself. And it’s in that position that she can see each pebble “entirely as it was.” Presumably (using some analogous logic in the poem) how she now sees each low-income apartment as it is.

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“Into the Mountains,” by April Goldman

What I really enjoyed about Goldman’s poem is how it positions the self among nature, and then thinks about the world from this perspective. What is it to be a self among nature? How is it someone would feel themselves as a self if they saw the world like that? Like a continually multiplying self-awareness that is rooted in nature.

Links for more information:April Goldman’s HomepagePublished in Best American Poetry 2022, edited by David Lehman and Matthew Zapruder

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Reading Past the “Poetic Speaker”

For several years, I have been working on reading methods that extend a poem past its “poetic speaker.” Not that reading for speaker is unhelpful or unnecessary. I just don’t see it as part of the end game in my reading process. Or I’m interested in having complex models for when I come across an interesting poem, and it’s clear to me that identifying its speaker and their motives doesn’t really take me very far into the poem. Reading for speaker feels like I’m stepping past a series of familiar signposts. And I don’t have to think all that carefully about why those signposts are there. It’s like the arguments from the 90s that were in favor of narrative poetry, where certain people would insist a poem satisfy some implied rubric. It feels so easy for those people to argue this, because “accessibility” could assure them of “relevance.” Of course, it was easy arguing against narrative, too, because a rubric for poetry feels very lowest common denominator.

Thankfully, it shouldn’t matter anymore, all those arguments about narrative. How if there isn’t narrative, then a poem probably doesn’t “matter” (was kind of the gist of Dana Gioia’s article from the 1990s). I prefer American poetry in the 2020s, because I don’t know that there is some paradigm for how you’re supposed to read a poem. And it feels like that legacy of New Critical reading has found a reasonable resting place at the margins of poetry culture, like New Criticism was the crumpled aluminum foil teachers used for discussing baked poetry. And why not keep some aluminum foil around?

But I prefer the poems that easily complicate themselves. For instance, Destiny O. Birdsong’s poem, “love poem that ends at popeyes” (from her book, Negotiations). Reading through the poem as a poetic monologue is definitely helpful for summary. I mean, it’s awaful being alone on Valentine’s Day. And the speaker of Birdsong’s poem is there. She’s no longer with this man she was with, but, well, he really didn’t get her anyway (buying her something gold for the holiday when she prefers wearing silver). Focusing mainly on speaker, I feel this person’s position. Like maybe it’s better this way. Valentine’s really is just a fiasco. “Awkwardly” accepting the flowers, disingenuous “thank you”’s for the gifts she was given.

The poem signals, however, that reading it for speaker alone starts getting complicated. On the level of language, there are statements where the “woman” referred to could be the speaker. It could also be a woman the speaker imagines getting flowers on Valentine’s.

they are picking out fistfuls of roses or maybe tulips
maybe assorted flowers with daffodils
& he knows the woman he really loves will dip her nose
into them like a doe & say thank you thank you

(from “love poem that ends at popeyes”)

In this instance, who is “the woman [this man buying flowers] really loves”? It could be the woman the speaker’s date is visiting instead of her. Or the speaker is fantasizing she could be the version of a woman this man imagines her as while he’s buying her flowers, because then she wouldn’t have to be lonely on Valentine’s Day! And given that sentiments like this take up the first two-thirds of the poem, it would be tempting to say Birdsong is mainly concerned with consolation. The “negotation” (Negotiations being the book’s title) someone conducts with themselves as they recognize how unsatisfying it is to particiapte in a series of hollow “romantic” gestures. And, yes, consoling yourself with an argument like this is mainly a rationalization against loneliness. Fortunately for this poem, the speaker is realizing there is something better. Wait, instead, says the speaker. Something you really want will be worth the wait. Like how she’s willing to wait for that “spciy dark” chicken at Popeyes. And like, wow! What she says about that chicken!

I would argue this poem extends past reading for monologue alone. Or, put differently, the poem has ready opportunities for other reading methods. In particular, I’m thinking of a method I’ve read about in Reuben Brower’s “The Speaking Voice,’ where you read both for poetic speaker and listener. And not just “listener” in that John Stuart Mill way. I mean, I admire Mill’s idea of the poet solitary in a room reciting their poem aloud, kind of knowing there is a listener eavesdropping on their recitation, and kind of oblivious to that fact. But the situation Mill describes doesn’t make me think about who the listener might be. I figure it’s me. And the poem being recited is Every Poem. Mill highlighting the “listener” might be helpful to see the solitary nature of poetry, and it might exaggerate how self-conscious the poet is or isn’t knowing someone or “no one” is listening to their poem.

Birdsong’s speaker doesn’t feel self-conscious to me. If anything, I feel like the speaker wants someone to be listening. A friend, just so she can be heard out. The “right person,” so they’ll know she has standards. Then there are moments where I wonder if she wishes the man who’s rejected her would listen to what she’s saying in this poem. At the end of the first stanza, the speaker rhapsodizes about how it would be more romantic to “run through fields / of bonnets so buckled with sky / they look bruised,” then she starts the next stanza:

why has no one ever loved me that way a bonnet
might engorge itself with blue so much it is a new
color unnameable breathless my loves hold
their breaths calculating they want me to look
at the food & the flowers

(from “love poem that ends at popeyes”)

I mean just a quick aside for loving someone the way a bonnet engorges itself with blue. Heartbreaking in this context. But it seems to me reading this part of the poem beyond its monologue sets a frame for the poem—a frame involving someone speaking and a specific someone listening. For me, it sounds different if I imagine the poet stationing this man opposite her. A “you left me on Valentine’s, now you listen to me” kind of situation. And considering how many different registers a poem can operate on, speaking to “you” is but one approach (an approach that has many different branches to it). But when I imagine the quote above preceded with a “you listen to me,” I can hear the argument sharpened. I can feel the speaker’s passion.

This is how Brower suggests reading a poem. If you can establish who the poet might be speaking to, you can consider the role the poet sees themselves playing, and you can play the social dynamic out between the two people. And with every fixed points that can be established, the poet’s tone of voice can be described more specfically. Granted, Brower’s method still relies upon the dramatic situation New Critics insisted on when reading a poem, but it’s a more elaborated situation. Or it’s asking people to read even more closely, because other parts of the poem might provide further guidance. And for me reading Birdsong’s poem, it’s thinking about what a poem can be when I’m reading for more than just her saying something.

Though with “love poem that ends at popeyes,” I would say most of the poem is the poet saying something. So how to balance my reading so it is flexible enough to let the speaker reading operate as monologue and other parts to complement that speaker reading. The speaker’s strife, her rationalizing self-consolation, her eventual epiphany at the hands of spicy dark chicken (an image I’m so enamored with because it’s the wisest moment of the poem, and it’s experienced in a drive-thru), these articulate an overall structure, and the poetic speaker serves as that structure’s center of gravity. However, in many ways, the poem alerts me to its propensity to stretch past the poetic monologue. Its uneven pacing, for one thing. The poem is cut into fragments, and rather than the monolgue’s smooth passage through each caesura and line break, the poem can unpredictably halt my reading, requiring me to remap syntax and sense. Also, the poem mixes figures, or splits them. The moment where the man who has left the speaker arrives at the supermarket to buy flowers, and he’s “one flesh man” and “one floor man.” This is another moment that pushes a reader out of the fluid monologue. And it’s the accumulation of moments like these that unsettle the stable frame of the poem and encourage having other resources at hand for reading.

For me, Brower’s “dramatic situation” is useful for just a couple moments in the poem. The opening of the second stanza (which I’ve quoted above). And then a moment in the middle of the fourth stanza:

i want him to be satisfied i want him to be happy
also i want to be happy we can do that separately
or we can do it together we can do it now
or we can do it later i am a hopeless
romantic

(from “love poem that ends at popeyes”)

The “him” here refers to a man buying flowers for the woman he loves, the poet indicating he should be allowed happiness with the woman he’s giving those flowers to (whether she’s the actual woman or the woman he was projecting the speaker of the poem to be when he would buy her flowers). This moment doesn’t feel as emphatically addressed to a specific man like the first instance where I used dramatic situation. But I don’t think it necessary to discover some single key for reading a poem. At leaset not this poem. Though I’ll say, in any poem what I really want is for it to do something interesting and to give me the impression it knows it’s doing that thing without needing to say it.

I’ll just conclude by looking briefly at Jericho Brown’s poem “Inaugural.” (which I found in Best American Poetry 2022). For my reading, it immediatley presents as a poetic monologue, though shaped more like a speech than a statement made in solitude. Maybe it could even be framed as an inauguration poem suited specifically to the inauguration in 2021. The talk about masks and diseases and “grandmothers” in the poem’s opening. But to position Brown’s speaker within a poetic monologue alone would be to underread the poem. The rhetorical embrace of the “we,” for one thing, makes it necessary to read for both poet and audience. And, as I’ve revealed in my speculation about the poem’s occasion, I can’t help but imagine a setting where people have assembled to hear this poem. What is the effect, then, of the poet aligning himself with who “we” are and why “we” are present for the poem? But then, as with Birdsong’s poem, there are benefits to a more conventional close reading based around speaker. The poem’s logic feels so assured and ceremonial. And yet, there are ruptures to this measured tone. For instance, the statement, “I don’t want / To be hopeful if it means I’ve got to be / Naïve.” Maybe this doesn’t rupture logic, but its profound comment is such a sudden surprise. The surrounding comments are straightforward rhetorical gestures, with the speaker aligning himself with the audience. These statements I see rupturing the more settled tone happen throughout. And, what I’m interested for in my reading, is accounting for these rhetorical explosions when the poem’s rhetoric feels more quietly assertive.

I say all this, because I don’t know how most people are taught to read poems. I feel like everyone is aware New Critical reading is full of inadequacies, but there is solid utility to reading in that New Critical light. As an undergraduate, I was taught to look for a poem’s meaning, and all I had was the poem’s language to find that meaning. I suppose, then, I would like to think that reading poems could be as much about how a poem is making meaning as the meaning that might be discovered through summaries or interpretations. As I’ve seen Matthew Zapruder argue in his book Why Poetry, there is substantive insight to found in literally reading the poem. And I would like to think most everyone is prepared for more than just literal readings of poems.

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Blog Post Title

What goes into a blog post? Helpful, industry-specific content that: 1) gives readers a useful takeaway, and 2) shows you’re an industry expert.

Use your company’s blog posts to opine on current industry topics, humanize your company, and show how your products and services can help people.

Fluffy Gluten-Free Chocolatecakes for Breakfast

The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing losing things in the process of copying and pasting.

Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content. What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…

Text & HeadingsImages & VideosGalleriesEmbeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.And Lists like this one of course Visual Editing

A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Matt Mullenweg, 2017

The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.

Media Rich

If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:

[image error]Credit: Michael Murray

Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it. The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.

Conclusion

Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also and is responsive out of the box. The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images.

Eat Less, Live Longer? The Science Of Fasting And Longevity

The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing losing things in the process of copying and pasting.

Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content. What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…

Text & HeadingsImages & VideosGalleriesEmbeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.And Lists like this one of course Visual Editing

A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Matt Mullenweg, 2017

The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.

Media Rich

If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:

[image error]Credit: Michael Murray

Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it. The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.

Conclusion

Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box. The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images.