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English is often called a glorious mess of a language. Unlike languages that guard their purity, English has never been shy about stealing vocabulary from others. Why coin a new word when you can borrow (or outright snatch) one that’s already in use abroad? Linguist James D. Nicoll put it most colorfully: “The problem with…
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Is Langston Hughes a Modernist poet? That question, once handed to me in a college classroom, now strikes me as too small for the man who so clearly saw poetry as a public force. Labels like “Modernist” tend to flatten voices into movements. But Hughes resists neat categorization. Yes, he wrote in free verse. Indeed,…
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When George Washington took the oath of office in 1789, there was no blueprint for what a president should be. The Constitution provided a skeletal outline—vague by design, born from a fear of monarchy—but the practical and symbolic weight of the role was undefined. Washington’s true legacy lies in how he filled in that blank…
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What makes a poem a poem? Is it the line breaks, the rhythm, or the imagination? Or is it the weight of lived experience sculpted into something sharp enough to cut through memory? For poets Michael Palmer and Philip Levine, the answer differs—not in opposition, but in intention. Both are celebrated figures of contemporary American…
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On Jefferson, Hamilton, and the Elasticity of America’s Founding Document The year is 1790. The ink on the Constitution is barely dry, and already its meaning is up for grabs. At the heart of the young republic’s first major political schism lies a deceptively simple question: If something isn’t explicitly stated in the Constitution, can…
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If Elizabeth Bishop is a cartographer of the visible, then Robert Creeley is a geometer of the felt. One sketches every ridge; the other just the angle of the slope. Their poetic modes may seem like opposites on the surface—Bishop’s obsessive clarity versus Creeley’s elliptical sparseness—but together they reveal something crucial: the power of poetic…
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When I was watching Scott’s Thoughts YouTube video on Vespiquen in a Pokemon Platinum solo run, he said something interesting. He was talking about how we need to save the bees, which I entirely agree with. But for those saying that such a discussion doesn’t belong in a Pokemon video, his response is that these…
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There’s a dangerous myth that still lingers in how we teach, critique, and canonize writing—particularly essay writing. It’s the idea that language is fixed, finalized, etched in stone. We’re taught in grammar school that the first draft must already point toward the final product. Then, revision is about perfection, not possibility. But the essay was…
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There’s a moment just before sleep when the world slips off like a robe—heavy, clinging, and familiar. You’re not dreaming yet. But you’re no longer quite awake. Time stutters. The room exhales. Your body begins to forget its obligations. This is the first drift, the beginning of our unwinding. We don’t rush toward dreams, but…
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If we want to define a Neo-Modernist (or what I like to call post-postmodernist orientation), we’ll need shared terms for epistemological fatigue, spiritual data hoarding, authenticity glitches, narrative refusal, and meta-compassion fatigue. To this end I started the Ineffable Index, as I develop terms to help me anchor some concepts in name which are otherwise…