Contributor

Aaron Belz

Aaron Belz is a poet and essayist who has published work across a spectrum of journals, such as Books & Culture, The Washington Post, Boston Review, Paste, Fence, McSweeney’s, and Fine Madness. He has published two books of poems, The Bird Hoverer (BlazeVOX, 2007) and Lovely, Raspberry (Persea, 2010), and a third collection is forthcoming from Persea. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

“Perfume from a Dress”: How Poetry Persuades

Great poetry moves us because we remember it.

READ

More From This Contributor

Signals, Smartphones, and Still Small Voices

The human race must be busier than ever, knowing and retelling, talking and reading, liking and scrolling, deleting and adding—friending, following.

Yet sitting at the Wooden Nickel, in my physical body, wearing my particular clothes, I’m presented with a different, or at least complementary, range of possibilities.

On Satire

Jokes: a sophisticated form of border patrol and, in parody especially, correction.

A Regimen of Aimless Strolling

Billy Collins sashays into Big Ideas with apparent ease, poem after poem—death, love, the self, the death of love, love of the self. Beginning with the impossible or the mundane he transforms the conversation, like a witty party guest, into larger questions: Who am I? Why am I here?

A Poet’s Evolution

Johnston’s purpose is to explore the tension between the subjective and the objective, to keep these two realms of experience in balance.

The Mind is a Spa

Something is happening in the universe outside of, or irrespective of, the human narrative.

Dividing Zero

Dividing one makes two, and so on. But dividing zero? “Nothing can come of nothing,” Lear laments—and yet, as you know, God’s signature’s here. Where zero was, is one, then two: two lights, moon and sun; then man and woman; two brothers, two kingdoms— then one, one...

Fractals

Beset with information, and information, and information, what is the self?

Poetry’s next wave

The best of the new crop of poets are bridging the gap between avant-garde obscurantism and traditional narrative poetry. Consider the latest anthology from W.W. Norton, a browser’s introduction to poetry today.

Angry Notes

Poems that are a delight to speak aloud and whose contents are worth pondering.

‘A dangerous and disturbing development’

In the September 16 2007 Boston Globe, Anthony Kronman—the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale University—writes, "In a shift of historic importance, America's college and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life's most important question is an appropriate...

What is to be done… about schooling?

Aaron Belz thinks the contemporary high school classroom is a bastion of the bourgeois, that students who excel in this environment are gifted at waiting in line at the drinking fountain, and that the Socratic method is a form of hectoring. He offers an alternative way of doing . . . schooling.

Planet-Like Music

An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy) by Philip Sidney, R. W. Maslen, ed. (Manchester University Press, 2002, 304 pp, $36.95) In what has been called the "most stylish and seductive work of literary theory written in the Renaissance," Sir Philip Sidney...

On Craft

With Comment, we try and connect three things in every issue (although not necessarily all three at the same time in every single piece we publish): (1) the Christian worldview, (2) everyday-work-as-cultural-engagement, and (3) economic life.We are convinced that work...