As David Lehman suggests in his foreword to The Best American Poetry 2012, Mark Doty collects a wide variety of poems that have a mysterious and “uncanny” quality, poems which are almost haunted by the “spirit in the dark.” Read More
"You have to decide how honest you want to be in your writing: if you want to leave it in your diary or put it in a book. Yes, the experiences are intense but you have to allow yourself to go there, to cross that line."
At the heart of Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a counter-intuitive nostalgia for unbelonging. In his long form poem-cum-memoir, Brainard shares glimpses of his childhood and early adulthood that evoke lusty contradictions—the pleasure, pain, and curiosity of growing up different in America. It is a tribute to the self that survived, and the selves lost along the way.
In the same way Shane Allison’s own version of I Remember, published in 2012 by Future Tense Books, also evokes a sense of wonder, frustration, joy and sadness. Read More
"If you stumble upon negative comments concerning your body or your personality, remember that the online universe equalizes every utterance, and that negative or humiliating comments concerning your body or your personality weigh no more than a feather. Imagine the feather blowing away."
Poet, critic, and author Wayne Koestenbaum took some time to talk with Lambda about the process of writing about humiliation, Harpo Marx, and how poetry informs his cultural criticism. Read More
Unlike other contemporary poets, Trinidad is good at making campy realities, such as kitsch Hollywood cinema, sound confessional, autobiographical. This deliberate and ostentatious, almost anti-academic, humor is part of his charm. Read More
