Ange Mlinko's Venice Reviewed by Rhian Sasseen
"Many of the poems in Venice are sestinas, a complex and winking form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, with line endings that rotate in a set pattern; with its roots in the songs of 12th-century French troubadours, it’s a form that requires both mathematical precision and a light touch to make it all look easy...In both her focus on these older poetic forms and her choice of subject matter—a sinking city in Italy, a coastal city in Florida, and the looming dangers posed by humankind’s destructive tendencies—the poems of Venice work to merge the living with the dead."
via THE NATION |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Petra Kuppers on Language as Form
"In the case of 'Split/Screen,' the magic structuring principle of 'fourteen' hovered in my brain. The sonnet is a device I often use, not necessarily as a formal frame but as a couplet structure to hold against my freewrite. This offers a scaffold toward something that can spread out on the page and take up space in the world." |
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