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The Non-Turning Of Recent American Poetry On David Caplan's Questions Of Possibility: Centemporary Poetry And Poetic Form, Michael Theune

Michael Theune

David Caplan’s Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (Oxford University Press, 2005) is a good and necessary book that teaches or reinforces some vital lessons about poetry and poetic form. According to Caplan, his book is a necessary corrective, a check on “our current understanding of poetic form, especially contemporary metrical verse” which Caplan describes as emerging from the ever-perpetuated, and perpetuating, over-simplified binaries of the poetry wars—open/closed, Language/New Formalist—and which Caplan labels simply adequate.”

Originally published in Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and used with permission.

It Not Do Fall For: On The Paradelle, Michael Theune

Michael Theune

With the invention of the paradelle form by poet Billy Collins and the furtherance of the paradelle in Theresa M. Welford’s The Paradelle: An Anthology (Red Hen Press, 2005), a new hoax has entered poetry’s domain. However, while somewhat similar to Warner’s hoaxes, the paradelle hoax is in many ways unique, and uniquely problematic—though increasingly interesting.

Originally published in Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and used with permission.

Stevens In The 1930s, Alan Filreis

Alan Filreis

An overview of Wallace Stevens' poetic response to radical poets and ideas in the American 1930s.