[Trigger warning: this post discusses a poetic episode featuring incest.] In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire, which she ultimately consummates . She does so via the aid of her nurse, a maternal...
In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric. Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism. In a 2020 interview...
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 learned English and Latin and begun writing, publishing her first verses in a Rhode...
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 fictionalized retelling of the First Mongol Invasion of Japan in the mid 1270s...
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 examining whether or not rap is poetry, it seems worthwhile to explore how...
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 and speed, coffee symbolizes wasted time...
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 comes from a longer steeping process. But if you really want to be an...
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 lacking supernatural powers) arise throughout the U...
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 is predominately oral, driven by innovation from marginalized demographics...
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 January 2021.[1] Widescale coverage of the videos by mainstream news outlets may...