Adrian Blevins: Appalachians Run Amok
I’m impatient like you to get to the bottom of the problem
of what to call the vacant feeling of our long-ago deportation
from the goats & their creamy milk & the meadows & pastures
they would frolic in each Sunday when my father would
metaphorically herd them…
Adrian Blevins: How I wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha
I wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha by tattooing the word WRONG across my heart to help me muster the strength I’d need to argue with a world that wanted me to say “hey, y’all!” in a hill-country accent sipping tea under a dogwood in a pink smock smattered with etchings of ivy.
Adrian Blevins: Our Maine Ruinlust
“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”
Adrian Blevins: My Problem with the Rules
If my nine-year-old son behaves in any manner contrary to the rules and regulations by which humankind has agreed to conduct itself since the day we got civilized and invented … Continue reading
Michael Simms: A Note from the Editor on the Vagaries of Publishing Poetry on the Internet
Once again, a poet has emailed me, peeved that a poem of hers that appeared in Vox Populi is not anything like the version she sent me. The line-endings and … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: Nouns in their Habitats
New Pilgrims at Tinker Creek: I read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for the first time when I was about fourteen years old. I don’t remember now what I … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: Portrait of my X
I met him nearly twenty years ago in an early morning college yard and in all this time he has changed very little. Nothing about being alive exasperates me more … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: My Mother’s First Husband
My mother’s first husband, who was the first mentally ill person I ever met, rents storage spaces all over D.C. He saves in crate after carton after crate: paper towel … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: What Makes Us Lose Our Minds
You find out about people like Nigel in little bits and pieces, anyway. It happens while you’re wondering whether the hills might in another country look like white elephants until … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: Of Madmen and Spies
I take as my theme the mentally ill, understanding as I do just how tepid the bathwater is. So let’s not neglect for a moment the voyeur’s own affliction—her writerly … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: Late-Breaking Yew-Berry News from the Madman’s Love Shack
The catalogue of infractions I have committed against this world would overflow a small library, for what it’s worth. I pilfered a pack of gum before I could talk; I … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: Word Gluttons and Rhythm Sluts, Book Letches and Paragraph Drunks — The Magic of Metaphor
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. –Pablo Picasso With your permission I’d like to take a few minutes … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: In Praise of the Sentence
What do cocktail party talk and poetry have in common? Like Barbara Hamby at the end of her gorgeous “Millennium Rave,” I come to praise the sentence in poetry “in … Continue reading
Adrian Blevins: An Ode to the Erection
I sing, for my daughter, of shanks and shafts and the endearing contrast between the mind’s affairs and the body’s undiscriminating inclinations.
Vox Populi 