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The roots of the word exhibition are instructive: from ex "out" + habere "to hold." An exhibition holds out a particular narrative, a thesis, and framing of a subject. A...

Harriet Monroe and The Columbian Ode

The Business of Poetry

Women’s Rights and Spirituality at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair

Contesting Columbus at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.  It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.  My language trembles...

“Which of us has not,” writes Charles Baudelaire in the introduction to Paris Spleen, “in his moments of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or...

What does it mean if a poem is “neither pro nor con abortion”?

Look closely at a typical map, and you will notice that it is covered in language—the names of countries, types of rivers, cardinal directions. Language helps shape geography and vice...

Read “Apology” by Sharon Olds several times, out loud or silently. Questions to consider, on your own in writing, or in discussion with others: What is the connection between the mice and...