Author: Steven M. Critelli

Against Interpretation.
by Steven M. Critelli March 15, 2016 1
Literary Criticism

A.R. Ammons – “Cascadilla Falls”

The poem exerts a magnetic attraction, largely due to its lyric intensity and the unpredictable development of its content: from a pastoral setting on Cornell’s campus in Upstate New York (where the “single creek” featured in the poem cuts through the Cascadilla gorge), to the capaciousness of its scientific quantifications of the cosmos and the apparent awe inspired by the poet’s realization of his place in the universal scheme, and finally to the surprising lament at the end of the poem.

by Steven M. Critelli February 2, 2016 Number of comments0
Literary Criticism

Notes on Ange Mlinko’s “Cottonmouth”

I was intrigued by Ange Mlinko’s newest published poem, “Cottonmouth” (Poetry Feb. 2016), a dense linguistic tour de force that weds the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with a locus in the contemporary American landscape, using stacks of cultural references like sampled sounds and playing them against an urban rap rhythm, then overlaying that with a verse form that invokes Virgil and Dante as it might have been imagined by James Joyce.

by Steven M. Critelli March 5, 2015 Number of comments0
Literary Criticism

Excerpt from “Reading Alice Fulton’s Barely Composed” – Essay on “Triptych for Topological Heart”

 Fulton leverages this episteme in the sonnet trio, “Triptych for Topological Heart,” to illustrate Western culture’s transition from classical religious dogma to new age secularism. The scientific theory of “topological psychology” describes the plasticity of human behavior and its propensity to adapt itself to a given environment. A significant part of this adaptation is the dominating role of concrete science over the increasingly subsidiary position of the closed-loop systems of myth and ideology.