Critical Fabulation in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s ‘The Age of Phillis’
Phillis Wheatley, abducted from Africa and brought to America as an enslaved person in 1761, is not only the first African American to publish a book, but is also the first to obtain international recognition as a writer. A genius child, within four years of her enslavement in Boston (at about age 11), she had
Ghost of Tsushima’s Interactive Haiku
The PlayStation game Ghost of Tsushima (2020) sold at a record-setting pace, globally netting six and a half million sales as of March 2021.[1] In the game, players take on the role of Jin Sakai, one of a few surviving samurai present on Tsushima island (located right between South Korea and southern Japan) during a
Is Rap Poetry? – Let’s ask Google.
The titular question of this blog post is one that I’d subconsciously filed away under “yes” quite some time ago, a question I’m now realizing I’d never considered with much rigor. The answer still remains a yes after further looking into the subject—albeit with some minor caveats. I will go over those caveats, but before
What if Coffee is Responsible for Fascism? Lol jk …Unless? Part II
In 1915, T.S. Eliot published his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry. It presents the wandering thoughts of an alienated, likely depressed, and certainly indecisive modern man. In thinking of his indecisiveness and unsatisfactory life, he says, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Here, instead of representing productivity
What if Coffee is Responsible for Fascism? Lol Jk …Unless? Part I
Any old hipster will tell you that the best coffee—as per the directions of the barista at their favorite third wave coffee shop—is made with a Chemex Pour Over. You could, however, opt for the French press, (the modern design actually comes from Italy, an important note), if you prefer the thicker, oily consistency that
Poetic Politics in Watchmen and “Desolation Row”
It’s no secret that Bob Dylan’s lyricism was a crucial point of inspiration for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s seminal ‘86–‘87 comic, Watchmen, in which the superhero narrative comes under a gritty and subversive lens intended for mature readers. The comic depicts an alternate 20th century history where a number of masked vigilantes (costumed, but
THE POETICS OF SEA SHANTIES, PART II
This week’s post is a continuation of last week where we examined the current sea shanty trend and began to situate it in relation to popular poetry as defined in Dana Gioia’s 2004 book Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture? Gioia identifies four ways that popular poetry differs from literary poetry: it
The Poetics of Sea Shanties, Part I
Unless you’ve been lost at sea, you’re likely familiar with the tidal wave of popularity that sea shanties have garnered since the beginning of the year. Shanty performances sailed to the top of the charts in the UK, netting three billion views on TikTok alongside a 7000% increase in Spotify listens by the end of
Grounded and Ungrounded: Technology of Space in Dracula
This week, I’ll be working through the beginnings of a new reading of the gothic horror novel Dracula (1897) to both argue something about the novel and connect its work to broader themes in horror media. In this post, I’ll explore how the book’s villain-vampire Count Dracula is recurrently characterized as having a kind of
Utopia and Mapping the Imaginary
In something of a loose association with my previous post, I’ll be writing and thinking this week about another interesting intersection between images and text. In particular, I’ll be exploring both old and new attempts to map Thomas More’s seminal text Utopia. Written in 1516, More’s Utopia is a text which provides the first major