Learning To Love The Questions: Do All Writers Write with a Feminine Soul?
My body, in other words, physically rejects the idea that I write as anyone other than the man I am or that my experience as a man is therefore any less inclusive of everything you mean when you use the phrase “feminine soul.”
Learning To Love The Questions: To Write Is To Sit In Confrontation With Yourself
Wrestling with yourself like that, if you’re honest about it, is to court what can be a very frightening vulnerability, because it means by definition having the audacity to lay claim to a readership’s attention...
Learning To Love The Questions: What Would Literature Be Missing Without You?
[I]f I had never written, if not a single word of mine had ever been published, literature would not be missing a thing.
Learning To Love The Questions: The Source of War
I would never have been able to articulate it this way back then, but I was struggling with the question of whether and how I could resist the militarization of my imagination.
Learning To Love The Questions: Sometimes Resisting Means Recommitting Yourself To What You’re Already Doing
Over the last four years that I’ve been reading the statement, however, and especially since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, it has become an affirmation that gathering as we do every month is itself a form of resistance that we should not take for granted.
Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 5
It’s ironic, then, that the metaphor [Attar] constructed for bewilderment is itself “bewildered” in that it simultaneously reveals and denies both the sexual vulnerability of the male body and the trauma that is inherent in how the princess sexually coerces the slave.
Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 4
None of the responses I found asked why the chasteness Donne’s speaker craves should require an act of sexual violence in the first place, much less one that is generally understood in the real world to be something men perpetrate almost exclusively against women.
Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 3
“If you take those narratives at face value, though, those violations seem less like actual assaults, literal or metaphorical, than a necessary condition for spiritual growth to take place.”
Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 2
(Read Part 1 here.)
When I was an undergraduate, a man I looked up to as a teacher and a
Learning To Love The Questions: The Power We Pretend Not To See 1
"To me...the error is in thinking that the impulse to self-erasure that the nightingale and the dervish feel so passionately resembles love even remotely."
The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Poetry to Violence and Trauma
—Based on a talk I gave on a panel in 2017 at the Western Maryland Independent Literary Festival
Learning To Love The Questions: The Kind Of Courage These Times Call For
not from poets in particular, but from poets no differently than anybody else
