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Since the 1970s, Los Angeles poet Will Alexander has pursued poetic language as a combustive yet precise zone of experience. In an interview with…

Through her scholarship and criticism, hooks, who died this week, rewrote our understanding of Black feminism and womanhood, and gave a generation of readers a new way of looking at the world.

David Grundy on A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle

Cartoon by Kim Warp Yet poetry seemed capacious enough for both approaches to history: making it up and plumbing its depths. Returning to “Chant des Andoumboulou” gave Mackey “a sense of society as a kind of poem, social ritual as a kind of poem. So, therefore, the poem as a kind of society, made up of elements like sound, and sense, and the look words have on a page, the look line breaks give to a poem.” He began moving away from poems as discrete pieces of writing—the sealed-off odes that we are taught in school. He thought of how the musicians he loved, like Coltra...

Untitled, 1959. Art by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. Used by permission of Rich Shapero. © Rich Shapero. The Combustion Cycle (Roof Books, 2021), by Will Alexander, gathers three long poems written over two decades: “Concerning the Henbane Bird,” “On Solar Physiology,” and “The Ganges.” At more than 600 pages, the book calls attention to one of the great originals of contemporary US poetry, and at the same time it’s a record of something else—something that has less to do with contemporary US poetry and more to do with another model of time and tra...