A world without poetry would be a dire thing indeed. From Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night to Shakespeare’s famous love sonnet parody, Sonnet 130, the forms of ...

From ancient Greek soapbox soliloquies to viral TikTok videos of poetry slams, spoken word has always charged language with kinetic immediacy. Encompassing a unique blend of honesty and an engaging ...

Ian Hamilton Finlay, interior of “4 Sails” (1966) (image courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay) Tug, fug, chug, glug — such are the rhyming words used by the writer and artist Ian Hamilton ...

Nestled in cafes, bars, and school auditoriums are poets finding ways to reach new audiences through performative techniques revived for the modern era. Performance poetry, or spoken word, is far from ...

Where are the boundaries between adjacent literary forms? When does prose become poetry, poetry become song, song become theater? These bounds are collapsing as contemporary artists experiment. Though ...

Poetry in the 21st century is both ubiquitous and oddly peripheral. Verses are displayed on subway walls, recited on momentous occasions, and served up in giant fonts on social media, but rarely do ...

The poet, like countless others precariously employed in higher education, faces yet another broke summer. In Eckes’s poem, two forms sit in direct confrontation. The unemployment form, with its ...