Author: Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author and editor of over ten books of poetry and criticism, including Monticello in Mind: 50 Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (2016),Orexia: Poems (2017)., and the forthcoming “more truly and more strange”: Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems (Persea, 2020). Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. Among her awards for teaching are an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the Faculty Award of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professorship appointment for 2016 - 2018. Her commentaries, reviews, and columns about poetry have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Ecstasy’s Prosody: The “suasive turnings” of Stephen Cushman’s Hothead

Hothead
by Stephen Cushman
(LSU Press, 2018, $19.95, 88pp.)

. . . [anxiety] thins the rhythms, rushing into longish gaits, more
distance in less material time: it hates clots, its stump-fires

level fields: patience and calm define borders and boundaries,
hedgerows, and sharp whirls: anxiety burns instrumentation

matterless, assimilates music into motion, sketches the high
suasive turnings, mild natures tangled still in knotted clumps.

from “Anxiety’s Prosody” by A. R. Ammons

Ecstasy’s Prosody: The “suasive turnings” of Stephen Cushman’s Hothead full post

(1508 words, estimated 6:02 mins reading time)