Christopher J. Scalia

The challenges of teaching poetry.

At the beginning of the year, just in time for the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, Boston Review published a poetry chapbook called Poems for Political Disaster. Collecting works by 36 poets, nearly all of which are published there for the first time, the book is a chance, according to…

When Weldon Kees disappeared, at the age of 41, he seemed on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent American poets of his generation. He had three collections to his name, and his work had been published in such periodicals as Sewanee Review, Poetry, Harper's, and the New Yorker. But on…

It's easy to understand why Barack Obama's supporters are so sad to see him leave the White House. Although he wasn't quite the liberal Reagan he had hoped to become, he was nonetheless an inspiring (for them, anyway) and often successful champion of progressivism—who's been replaced by Donald…

The poet and novelist Ron Rash has said that “writing poetry and fiction are like AM/FM. They're on a completely different frequency." He says that poetry "for me is more intuitive. A story is not: a story is something you have to articulate." This distinction between the creative processes does…

Hillary Clinton said something during the second presidential debate that demands fact-checking. Referring to her senatorial victory in 2006, she claimed: "67 percent of the people voted to re-elect me when I ran for my second term, and I was very proud and very humbled by that." It's not the…

This is not another glowing review of the universally-praised Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance's first-hand account of the problems facing the white working-class in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Not because I don't like the memoir—along with apparently everyone else who has read it, I found the memoir…

It’s unfair to say that athletes, and the people who discuss them, commit more penalties against the English language than anyone else in our culture—pop musicians, actors, politicians, and academics are all in foul trouble. But sports personalities have their own unique brand of cringeworthy…

Late last month, at the end of a turbulent academic year at Yale, a petition appeared online that asked—demanded, really—the English faculty to change its requirements for majors. Although its specific demands are inconsistent, the gist is clear: The students don't want to take a two-semester…

In a lighter moment of William Blake's life, a friend encountered him and his wife Catherine reading Paradise Lost in their garden. Naked. Blake supposedly told the friend, "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve, you know."

Are you watching Scream Queens? Me neither. But I did catch a scene of the FOX slasher-comedy and was surprised to see that my father, Justice Antonin Scalia, made a cameo appearance. Sort of.

President Obama’s hour-long conversation with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, published in two parts in the New York Review of Books, inspired responses that were so hyperbolic and adoring, it felt like 2008 all over again.

Fellow poets and lovers of poetry, take heart—our art is relevant again!  Though not necessarily for the right reasons.