The Blog
Long-form close readings, opinions I am prepared to defend, and working methods you can use tonight. Every article is a full essay, not a listicle.
Sonnet 18 Is Not a Compliment — It's a Contract
Everyone quotes the first line at weddings. Almost nobody notices that Shakespeare spends eight lines proving the comparison is wrong, then signs a four-hundred-year contract with the reader.
The Bird That Never Asked for a Crumb: Reading Dickinson's Hope
Twelve lines, one metaphor, and a final turn that quietly reframes hope as the only comfort that never sends an invoice.
The Most Misread Poem in America, and Why the Misreading Is the Point
Frost tells us twice that the two roads were identical. A century of readers has decided not to hear it — which is exactly the behaviour the poem was written to describe.
How to Write a Poem That Isn't Boring: A Working Method
Most beginner poems fail for the same four reasons. Here is a repeatable process — image first, abstraction last — plus the revision checklist I actually use.
Can AI Write a Good Poem? A Candid Assessment
Generated verse is fluent, pretty, and structurally competent. It also lacks the one thing that makes a poem matter — and that gap tells us something useful about our own writing.
Neruda and the Uncomfortable Pleasure of Writing About Loss
"Tonight I can write the saddest lines" is not a boast about grief. It is a confession about craft — and the most honest heartbreak poem in the language partly because it admits enjoying itself.