Roddy Lumsden:
"Much of my last year has been spent preparing an anthology, Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets, which presents the work of a generation of poets who have first published since the early 1990s. Due to the appearance of fin de siècle anthologies, there has been a longer gap than usual between generational anthologies, with seventeen years separating my volume from Hulse, Kennedy and Morley's The New Poetry. Previously, there had usually been a gap of a decade or so, looking back to Penguin anthologies from Morrison and Motion in the early Eighties and Edward Lucie-Smith in 1970, then to Alvarez's 1962 The New Poetry and back further to various, generally factional anthologies—New Lines, New Signatures, The New Apocalypse. The 'shock of the new' then? The main purpose of these books, as I see it, is not to act as a canonical document of an era, but to spread the word, to educate, to recommend." The Forgotten New
Adam Zagajewski:
"If some other poets from his generation and beyond tied both their spiritual disquietude and moments of inspiration to the cause of their nation, to the historic situation, or to their starkly accentuated biography, Rilke, we know, remained free in this respect; he kept his creative fire far from the furnaces of political or societal passions. There is one exception though: in August 1914 he briefly shared the enthusiasm of German crowds for the just-beginning Great War (he was strengthened in this by his recent discovery of Friedrich Holderlin's poetry, which could be read in a patriotic mode). This happened in his Five Songs, written in the first weeks of the war. These poems sang the praise of a god of war as a great renewer of humanity. Later on, Rilke never joined those poets who wept over the disaster of the same war, which failed to renew anything except the death industry." Rereading Rilke
John Taylor:
"Every now and then during the past three decades, I have come across a poem by George Szirtes in a literary magazine and, after reading it, been left in a state of marvel; or in a meditative mood; and with the urge to read more poems; yet.... What I am trying to say—and you may have experienced this with other writers who long remain amiable strangers for you, smiling knowingly as they stroll by yet once again vanishing around the corner—is that I have always been delighted to read anything by this Hungarian-born British poet, but that I had, paradoxically, never gone to the trouble of procuring his collections . . . " The Desire to Affirm: The Poetry of George Szirtes
Nerys Williams:
"So is the long poem a monstrosity? Can the long poem be a test of the poet's sincerity and the reader's patience? Are long poems now anti-epics eschewing ideas of cultural programming for an embrace of failure, error and discontinuity? Why indeed do poets still bother writing long poems?" The Monstrosity of the Long Poem
William Logan:
"The poet has interior landscapes in which to disappear and conformities without that conceal a radical soul within—Stevens was a lawyer, so was his father, so were his two brothers. What is Jaggers or Tulkinghorn but a man paid to keep secrets? (One might say of Stevens that the secret he kept at last from himself was the secret of himself.)" The Sovereign Ghost of Wallace Stevens
Christian Wiman:
"It is now seven months since Craig Arnold died—or vanished, as most notices have termed it. We have delayed running an obituary for him partly because of the circumstances of his death. As most people in the poetry world now know, he disappeared while exploring a volcano on a Japanese island, and all indications are that he suffered a fatal fall in such a remote and dense location that his body may never be found. Another part of the delay, though, perhaps the better part of it, is this: I knew Craig, and knew him to be a person in whom life burned so intensely and immediately that not only is his death at forty-one a shock, but in some part of my brain it simply will not register." To Let You Pass
Dorothy Barresi:
"When one is no longer at the center of popular culture, shaping it, one becomes, de facto, an analyst, an observer rejecting or making sense of change. What one might gain in institutional power one loses in revolutionary street cool. One becomes a pundit, or a poet laureate, or President." Baby Boom Poetry and the New Zeitgeist
Donald Revell:
"Memories of Robert Creeley are a blessed common ground and meeting place for several generations of American poets—my own especially, as we were fortunate enough to know him first as a teacher and then as a friend. There is a forward congruence to all these memories, an echoic singularity of chastening mischiefs and tender prescience. I step forward here in remembrance now, mindful of one of Bob's most perfect poems, 'Heroes,' the piece in which the Cumaean Sibyl’s injunction to Aeneas at the threshold of the afterlife—'hoc opus, hic labor est'—chastens and teases language into filial, eternal return." Heaven's Commonplace: Hoc Opus, Hic Labor Est: Remembering Robert Creeley
John N. Serio:
"What can one say about a poet who writes, quite tenderly, 'And for what, except for you, do I feel love?' and who does not mean his wife, or his daughter, or any other person, but rather an imaginary figure: the muse? But that is how Wallace Stevens begins the prologue to what many consider his greatest poem ..." Introduction to Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems
Spencer Reece:
"What happens when a poet goes silent? Emily Dickinson's retreat and absence from church services led to the composition of her existential hymns. Sylvia Plath's failed marriage shut her down... It is impossible to imagine Gerard Manley Hopkins forging his sensual works without the anvil of his silences. His silences took three forms. First, the permanent longing that haunts the poems is unequivocally connected to the hands of a Jesuit who kept a vow of celibacy. I, for one, cannot separate the words that touch me today from the fact that the man who wrote them hardly touched." Countless Cries: Father Gerard Manley Hopkins
Lee Upton:
"The poet who turns to screenwriting. The novelist who writes poetry. The playwright who composes short stories. The critic who begins plotting a novel. Admit it. Doesn't a certain suspicion attach to each? As if to cross over from the primary genre into another genre is like cheating on one's true love. Or bigamy. Or, as if the writer, like the stuffy creep wearing a smoking jacket in a detective novel, lures the innocent maiden to his bed. The second genre is the illicit liaison. Something on the side." The Bigamists: Writers Crossing Genres
David Rivard:
"A bit of echolocation first. Riprap, Gary Snyder’s first book, came to be published in 1959, the same year as Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. The first, by Cid Corman's Origins Press in Kyoto, was a 500-copy edition with blue rice paper wrappers sewn in open navy-blue threadwork at the spine; the latter, a winner of the National Book Award, appeared in a cloth binding bearing the colophon of Farrar Straus and Cudahy, one of the most storied of American literary publishers. These books, as different in impulse and focus as two books could be, suggest in some sense the largeness Charles Olson referred to when he said, 'The first fact of America is space.' A space having as much to do with forces in flux—spiritual, psychological, economic forces—as with geography." A Leap of Words to Things: Gary Snyder's Riprap
David Mason:
"[T]o find the sort of vitality Burns brought to verse you have to look at the likes of Shakespeare and Yeats. He was at his best one of the great lyric poets, and he remains popular the world over. His birthday, January 25, occasions paraded haggis and whiskey toasts in cities as far-flung as Athens, Denver, Adelaide and Vancouver." Robert Burns’s Inspired Clay
Barra Ó Seaghdha:
"No Irish poet has ever been publicly celebrated as comprehensively as Heaney has this year, with the near-simultaneous arrival of Stepping Stones (a substantial review of his life and writing career in interview with Dennis O'Driscoll), a near-takeover of RTÉ Radio One on the big day (Heaney's seventieth), a television portrait by Charlie McCarthy, an RTÉ-sponsored celebration at IMMA, the related commissioning of works by Irish composers, numerous interviews, features and reviews in both print and broadcast media, and of course our little box." Ear of the Behearer
Adam Kirsch:
"The Sixties, historians have variously said, started with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or Elvis Presley’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. But a good case can be made that the Sixties really began when Ginsberg walked into Trilling’s classroom." Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg: Liberal Father, Radical Son
Dan Beachy-Quick:
'A poem is a means of capture. Then, it offers release. I love Edward Taylor's poem because it has captured me—or, perhaps, the opposite is more accurate; this poem has captured me because I love it. Love is an abandonment to confusion that doesn't merely seek clarity as a solution to its condition. Love loves bewilderment when bewilderment is rife with the possibility of meaning. I do not feel this poem is one I understand; it bewilders me; I feel there is something true in it. It captures me, yes—but that figure is reversed. For it has caught me not by my entering its trap, but by it entering the trap that is me: mind, and mind's maze. The poem, as with love, is a trap that traps itself within us; we don't step into it so much as it steps into us." On Edward Taylor’s “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly
Daniel Mendelsohn:
'In the poems of his youth and even certain poems of his middle age he quite often appears ordinary and lacking in any great distinction,' Seferis remarked during his 1946 lecture—another rather severe judgment whose underlying shrewdness cannot be denied, when we go back to so many of the poems Cavafy wrote in his thirties and even early forties, with their obvious debts to other writers and thinkers, their evasions and obfuscations. And then, as Seferis went on to say, 'something extraordinary happens.'" Introduction to C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, The Poet-Historian
Claudia Keelan:
"1. Preliminaries
1. To experience time passing and to know the sensation is the truth and province of poetry
2. To feel the onus of this knowledge as a physical law
3. A physical law and a dynamic which winds the experiencing subject into a circuitry: animal-human, me in you, us in them, then in now, citizen in state, nation in world, heaven in hell
4. To become a traveler, a willing émigré, in service of that circuitry, to write the poem that is each time and oftener the newest expression of that dynamic which is universal love" Ecstatic Émigré
Tom Sleigh:
"Gunn had many lovers and sexual partners, but he also spent thirty-three years with the same housemates. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—as Gunn says in his poem 'Transients and Residents,' 'I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men'—aren’t necessarily incompatible with personal loyalty, homebodiness, and domestic stability." Thom Gunn’s New Jerusalem.
James Longenbach:
"Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885; he died in Venice in 1972. In between, he lived for extended periods of time in London, Paris, and the Ligurian resort town of Rapallo: each of these places he left with a feeling of having failed." Ezra Pound at Home.
R. S. Gwynn:
R. S. Gwynn reviews recent collections by Clive James, John Whitworth, Dick Allen, John Poch, and Rebecca Foust, from the spring issue of The Hudson Review: "On the one hand, we are asked to read the poems of a relatively unknown poet, each on its own terms; on the other, we may be reminded that in order to write the poems of Clive James one has to be Clive James—globetrotter, intellectual-without-portfolio, media maven, inquisitor of the Spice Girls, and pal of Princess Di—and that it's not always easy separating the message from the messenger." Given the Gift of Time.
Victoria Chang:
"... for me, I like to go more into corporate life and deeper into it, versus kind of around it. I don't think there are any topics that can't be talked about in poetry, just like I think a poet can be anything she wants to be outside of poetry—she can have a day job. A poet can be an investment banker if she so chooses, and I think that idea of non-mutual exclusivity, where you can do lots of different things and still be an authentic poet, gives me less shame, I suppose, writing about business, and less fear that people are going to think that that's not poetry because you're not supposed to write about certain things." The Split Life, Poetry with Perspective: An Interview with Victoria Chang.
Lisa Williams:
"When Graywolf's anthology New British Poetry came out a few years ago, I was struck by what the editors call the 'relaxed and innovative' ways of employing meter and rhyme. Two of the featured poets, Gillian Allnutt and Alice Oswald, stood out to me." An Innovative Music: Two British Poets
Dennis O'Driscoll:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man without a fortune must be in want of a job. It was certainly true of my own experience. And another truism—the one about the universality of death and taxes—soon acquired a special, indeed literal, significance for me. Death, after all, was what would earn me my living; death in the form of taxes, actually: death duties and inheritance taxes." The Taxman Cometh: A Notebook
John Hartley Williams:
"When I lived in Cameroon, I employed a cook called Jeannot. He was a man of about forty. The French Embassy no longer required his services so he came to work for me (bringing rather superior notions of what kind of food could decently be served for lunch). It was his custom to do the cooking naked. I was surprised when I saw this for the first time, but when he explained he had to wash his shirt and trousers, and they were hanging out to dry, I saw the point of it. Also it was very hot in the kitchen, there were only us two males in the household, nobody could get offended." Naked Cookery
Stephen Burt:
"You're in the family kitchen. Mom and Dad have been arguing—no, fighting—for over an hour, louder than the TV. As you overhear them (you can't avoid it), you realize that anything either parent tells the other can be reinterpreted, misinterpreted, and turned against its speaker. In the meantime, TV commercials invite you to reinterpret their endless pitches. ("Buy Wonder Bread," one familiar ad implores. But what makes the bread wondrous? What will this white bread make you wonder about? Could it be one of the ancient world's Seven Wonders? Would Mom or Dad even understand questions like these?)" Rae Armantrout: Where Every Eye's a Guard
Rosanna Warren:
"Like so many in my generation, I found Sylvia Plath's poems as a teenager. Or they found me. I remember carrying a copy of Ariel to my high school English teacher in a state of high excitement, and showing her 'The Couriers'. This woman who made such subtle sense of Donne could make no sense of 'Acetic acid in a sealed tin?'—but I thought I could; and I thought Plath spoke my private language.... A few years later, I rebelled in embarrassment at what I took to be Plath's narcissism and hysteria, and I tried to shed my own younger self who had reveled in those shrieks. It was embarrassment, and something more severe...." from A Symposium on Forsaken Favorites: Sylvia Plath
Honor Moore:
"This is a collection that seeks to mark how women poets made a poetry that, in two decades, altered the face of American poetry forever.... A new language began—not a language that was linguistically new (although there are scholars who make that argument), but a language new to them. New to us, I should say, because in the process of speaking what was hidden, we began to identify with one another as women, to become a 'we.'" Introduction to Poems from the Women's Movement
Lawrence Raab:
"One of the ways a poem can be eloquent is by pretending to have nothing to do with eloquence. This strategy has many dangers. If we catch the writer cultivating modesty, putting on airs by pretending to do the opposite, the poem's plain clothes will appear calculated for effect. Of course we know that all good art has been calculated for effect. Nevertheless, the directness of certain poems can seem wholly natural, as if the poet desired only to speak in the clearest possible way, saying just what needs to be said."
"Wisława Szymborska's poems feel like this, like unpremeditated thought, which is, at the same time, thinking of such clarity that its complications continually surprise us." Thinking Out Loud
Maureen N. McLane:
"Intimations. It is cold in Chicago, as cold as it gets in the Boston winters chilling Fanny Howe's poems. If you live near the lake, as I did, there are few trees to slow the wind as it blows down from Canada through the cracks where the joints of your window frames don't quite meet." Song and Silence: My Fanny Howe
Wendy Vardaman:
"No matter how personal, on the one hand, or resistant to narrative and coherence, on the other, each of the five first collections of poetry considered here puts story at its center. And each tells its story in lines that reach for lyrical heights, embracing beauty and artful language and rhetoric, even when—or perhaps especially when—the story is anything but beautiful." Defamiliarize Yourself
James Longenbach:
"'The pressure of the contemporaneous from the time of the beginning of the World War to the present time has been constant and extreme. No one can have lived apart in a happy oblivion.' Wallace Stevens made this remark in 1936, in the midst of the Depression, but its insight feels relevant today. Who can have lived apart in happy oblivion at any moment in the last seventy years? Stevens felt no respite from social pressures during the supposedly carefree twenties that followed the First World War, and what Robert Lowell would later call, with exquisite weariness, the unstoppable cycle of 'small war on the heels of small war' has continued to this day. How does a poet legitimately respond to a social climate determined by such events?" An Examination of the Poet in Time of War
Lee Upton:
"We know that the language of purity is connected to horrific violence, ethnic "cleansing," theories of "purity" in race and ethnicity and religious sect, and violence against women that proves ancient in its connection between "purity" and the honor of the group. One of the most contradictory and appalling phrases: Honor killing." Purity: It's Such a Filthy Word
Anne Carson:
"Silence is as important as words in the practice and study of translation. This may sound like a cliché. (I think it is a cliché. Perhaps we can come back to cliché.) There are two kinds of silence that trouble a translator: physical silence and metaphysical silence. Physical silence happens when you are looking at, say, a poem of Sappho's inscribed on a papyrus from two thousand years ago that has been torn in half... Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. And its intentions are harder to define." Variations on the Right to Remain Silent
Wes Davis :
"Reading [Ciaran Carson's] genre-bending new book... is like having your life flash before your eyes, twice. A narrative sequence of seventy linked poems in which the second half repeats the titles and themes of the first, For All We Know meanders two times through the circuitous story of a love affair between an Irishman and a Frenchwoman, whose shared experiences, along with the dimmer childhood memories they disclose in conversation, form a kind of montage history of Europe in the wake of World War II. The book is part poetry collection, part noir novel, part fugue. And the sum of the parts is an utterly engaging portrayal of what it feels like to fall in love, fall apart, grieve over the loss, and fumble for explanations." Poetry in Review: Ciaran Carson's For All We Know
David Mason:
"Poetry is an art of margins... Poets rarely think so. They prefer believing they are somehow at the center of things, but they rarely are. This is not to say poets are unimportant, only that they gain their importance in unexpected, unforeseeable ways... Hayden Carruth, who died at 87 on September 29, 2008, was a case in point. He was part of a great generation of poets, including Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Louis Simpson, Donald Justice, Marie Ponsot and Adrienne Rich, but he was never a figure of the cultural center. His poetry flourished despite decades of hardship and neglect." In Memoriam: Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
John Crowley:
"The poet and fiction writer Thomas M. Disch died on July 4, 2008, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was sixty-eight years old, had long been in poor health, and was threatened with eviction from the rent-controlled Manhattan apartment where he had lived for decades with his partner, Charles Naylor...Tom Disch, as we all called him and as he called himself when publishing poetry, was a friend of mine." Worldmaker: Remembering Thomas Disch
Jane Hirshfield:
"A studio is a place felt safe enough for changing inside of. It can be as tiny as a beach cabana whose modesty door goes down only so far as the knees. Outside, the feet of others pass by, some bare and sandy, some sneakered, others in thin white rubber thongs. Inside, sweatshirts, pants, wet bathing suits smelling of salt water and mildew, your own awkward and slightly ridiculous body. I have not been in or thought of such a space—it can hardly be called a room—for 40 years now. But this is what studio-thinking does: throws light outward, in every direction of place and time. A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond." Early Rooms
Daisy Fried:
"Freaks of nature and freakish nature, far-flung and underexplored places, things scientific and sci-fi, real things that seem invented, imaginary things that seem real. Orchids that grow underground. The introduction of starlings to America. Cities of the dead. Life on Jupiter's moon"—all in that "rare thing in poetry—a very good read." And: "Truth, Morality, Jewishness, Art and Art's Responsibility, Love, Zionism v. Palestinian Nationhood," all in a book that struggles "to move beyond [Modernist] tradition through a blend of formalism, Hebraicism, poetic midrash, and Modernist collage." In this week’s prose feature, "Questions and Quaggas," from the January issue of Poetry, Daisy Fried reviews singular collections by Sarah Lindsay and Peter Cole. Questions and Quaggas
Kate Daniels:
"There has long existed an idea in American literary culture that writers who publish a highly successful and critically acclaimed first book can rarely follow it with a similar achievement. In reviewing these second volumes of poetry, I wondered if that idea exerted any power over these writers, and I thought about the publication history of poetry by American women." The Nonanxiety of Influence
Morton Marcus:
"The style as well as the contents of kayak reflected the man. The magazine was filled with melodramatic engravings and illustrations clipped from nineteenth century books and magazines. Several of these were usually joined in a collage and carried a witty line or two of dialogue or commentary, which ironically commented on the illustration, or had some wittily incisive parallel to current events... The selection of work alternated between surrealist, deep image, or political poems, or all three at once. Hitchcock's rejection slips were florid sentences printed at the bottom of one of his seemingly endless selections of nineteenth century illustrations. His editorial method was to accept any piece that appealed to him on first reading. The rest he sent back to the would-be contributor within the week, or, in a typically flamboyant flourish I witnessed several times, he would cast an unacceptable manuscript into the nearest wastebasket. (He would always retrieve the discarded manuscript later and return it to the sender.)" George Hitchcock: The Alf, Kayak, and Santa Cruz
Dennis O'Driscoll:
"At that stage I was a graduate with a job, a self-respecting adult of sorts, but I was still subject to the usual old Northern Ireland reminders that I'd better mind my Fenian manners. The B-Special Constabulary were on the roads at night. The anti-Catholic speeches were still being delivered by Unionist leaders on the Twelfth of July. The whole gerrymandered life of the place seemed set to continue... So it probably doesn't overstate things to call that a hurt, although it wasn't one that set you apart. In fact, it bonded you, and the recognition and the consequences of that very bonding would eventually become something the poetry had to deal with also." Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
André Bernard:
There's failure and then there's Failure — in André Bernard's, "An Interview with Philip Schultz," this week's prose feature, the poet realizes his true subject only after "writing this poem all my life, from the moment I wanted to be a writer..." From Five Points: "Emotional truth is the reward of digging deeply enough to find the truth about how one really feels, but in order to convey this truth with any force, or artistry, one needs to 'create' a form of expression, and this form determines its own 'genuine information.' As Nietzsche puts it: 'And who among us poets has not adulterated his wine?'" An Interview with Philip Schultz
Jocelyn W. Knowles:
A "make-believe job" at the Saturday Review of Literature brings a young, aspiring writer to the verge of literary glory in Jocelyn W. Knowles's "My Interview with W. H. Auden," this week's prose feature from the Fall issue of Michigan Quarterly Review: "I had a feeling I was not among friends but did not know what to make of it. Was it my earlier disarray? My youth? Something in my appearance? My voice? I had scarcely spoken. Perhaps Auden, who was new to America, had discovered too late the magazine was not the publication he thought it. There was a reputable one in London with a similar name. Kallman was busy with his cigarette. One, half-smoked, lay sputtering on his soup plate in bitter, acrid last gasps. Should I ask him to put it out?" My Interview with W. H. Auden
Carmine Starnino:
A poet's progress in "reboot[ing] Irish poetry's available modes;" the "'lyrical diary' of five aller-retours to Paris between 1994 and 2004;" a "dream-to-reason ratio perfect for replicating... 'the feminine subconscious, or semi-consciousness;'" a "bluffer's guide to merfolk;" and "the abba of a mysterious, and mysteriously moving, chiastic experiment" — Carmine Starnino brings us news of all this and more in "Five From Ireland," from the November issue of Poetry, this week's prose feature, reviewing recent books by Eavan Boland, Harry Clifton, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and Ciaran Carson. Five From Ireland
Kim Addonizio:
"Many writers harbor the desire to become successful poets and rise to the top of their profession. To see one's name on the cover of a slender paperback, to have tens and perhaps even hundreds of readers, to ascend to a lecture podium in a modest-sized auditorium after being introduced by the less successful poet who has been introduced in turn by an earnest graduate student unsure of the pronunciation of your name—these are heady rewards. Beyond these lie the true grail: generous grants, an endowed chair at a university, the big money that will allow you to write and remodel your kitchen, while freeing you from reading the incoherent ramblings of inferior wannabes. How can you realize your dreams? Follow this step-by-step advice." How to Succeed in Po Biz
Garry Wills :
"Martial—Marcus Valerius Martialis, c. 40–c. 102 CE— ... was like later gossip columnists, out night after night prowling for what they can devour by denouncing. He is a Winchell in elegiac distichs. Or, more properly, he is like the gossip columnist in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, who makes a living off the absurdities and vices of his own society by mocking them. He is a complicitous critic, half enjoying what he sneers at, mixing entertainment with revulsion. He is a reforming voyeur, a compromised Savonarola. It is a complex role, not reducible to any one of its components... What connection might Martial have with modern America? Well, like the Romans, we Americans celebrate rural virtue while wallowing in urban vices." Rome's Gossip Columnist: Introduction to Martial's Epigrams
Colin Dayan:
"[Aimé] Césaire once quipped that anyone confused by his politics should seek it in his poetry. He seemed, at times, an advocate of poésie pure, a follower of Mallarmé’s craft of absence and elimination, especially in Les armes miraculeuses. But his poems also bear witness to the harsh realities of life in a colonial outpost under Vichy rule. He meant the “miraculous weapons” to be arms for the struggle against colonialism, as well as, in and of themselves, poetic annunciation. Behind the flames, grasses, guava, and hibiscus of his impossible landscapes, one catches sight of the lashing of bodies and rotting flesh, the stench of slave ships, the postures of sanctimonious politicians." Out of Defeat: Aimé Césaire’s miraculous words
Robert von Hallberg:
"It is unusual for lyric poets to inquire into civic bonds, and poets have rarely been pulled to the bosom of the American polity (Whitman is the grand exception). Indeed, there is a familiar literary tradition of configuring politics—as Ezra Pound did—as a contest between reasons of state and individual autonomy. Yet in recent years the most distinguished political poems have all engaged precisely the issue of what holds citizens together in a community, and with what consequences, intended and otherwise. In particular Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Frank Bidart, C. K. Williams, and Robert Pinsky have produced important and surprising explorations of contemporary civic solidarity." Poets and the People: Reflections on solidarity during wartime
Peter Cole:
"I'm as suspicious of my own moral inclination, or inclination to the moral, as I am interested in following it out along a line of poetry... Hugh Kenner has written of the ways in which translation can take one to the secret places of the imagination one might not get to otherwise. The same holds true for the dynamic use of convention and conventional form, and also of so-called organic or open form employed in conscientious fashion. It’s ludicrous—but all too common—to think that one leads to the predictable in poetry, the other to a place of breakthrough, or that one is inherently moral and the other somehow dissolute. What matters, and what’s truly organic within a literary tradition, is finding the right form in relation to a given subject or set of materials. Otherwise one just has a manner." An Interview with Peter Cole
Brendan Galvin:
"Once you realize that writing is a process and nobody out there is waiting with bated breath for what you'll do next, you can relax a bit. It becomes a habit of being. Seeing a poem grow from my hand onto the page feels good to me, and I'm not in a race to finish it. It isn’t piecework. That film image of the suffering artist is a bourgeois American joke as far as I'm concerned, but it's interesting how many poets feel they have to buy into it. Almost as if that alleged suffering is a justification for what they do, and the public will have more regard for them if they claim to sweat and toil. You’re lucky if you manage to get the time to go along with your inclination to write. It's not a curse; it’s a chance to give yourself an authentic life instead of an excuse." Atlantic Flyway To Whirl is King:
An Interview with Brendan Galvin
Clive James:
"Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention. To take the most startling possible example, think of "Spring," by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone knows the first line because everyone knows the poem. "Nothing is so beautiful as Spring" is a line that hundreds of poets could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way: designed, that is, to be merely unexceptionable, or even flat. Only two lines further on, however, we get "Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens" and we are electrified.... I wonder if there can be any successful poem, even the one disguised as an unadorned prose argument, which is not dependent on this ability to project you into a reality so drastically rearranged that it makes your hair fizz even when it looks exactly like itself." Little Low Heavens
Mark Halliday:
"My poems have often been described as very self-conscious. This is sometimes given as a reason for disliking them. In most of my poems, the speaker is aware that he's trying to say something on an occasion, under pressure, and that the saying is difficult. In some cases, this self-awareness becomes explicitly the awareness that 'I'm trying to write a poem here.' Now, this note is struck in countless poems by some poets older than me, of course. It's in Koch and O'Hara; it's in Bidart's great poem 'Golden State'; it's in some poems by Robert Pinsky, and Billy Collins, and Albert Goldbarth, and Robert Hass (just to name a few). But I carry it pretty far. Pinsky once advised me not to overdo it with the poems about writing, poems about being a poet. And I try not to allow a given manuscript to be swamped with such poems. I understand that such poems are very off-putting to some readers. However, again, my own path to truth seems often to require this explicit self -consciousness." "Heavy Trash": A Conversation with Mark Halliday
Martha Ronk:
"Many of Barbara Guest's poems work with vivid and unforgettable images—architectural, pictorial, swirling images that dissolve and nest and metamorphose. Her ekphrastic images, specifically, move away from the body of the text into their own space, offering the pleasures of opacity by obscuring, contradicting, or causing friction with other aspects of the poem." A Foreign Substance, a critical response to Barbara Guest's poem, "Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights"
Marion K. Stocking:
"Although the poems of Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish captured me first by their lyric power, I cannot read them without remembering history. Since the 1947 partition of Palestine to create the state of Israel three-quarters of the land reserved then to the Palestinians has been appropriated by Israeli settlements and restraints such as the separation wall. Darwish's homeland is by many accounts the most crucial tension area in today's tense world. The Palestinian people consider Darwish something like a poet laureate. What better guide can I imagine into this region in crisis than a poet whose work is not primarily polemical but nevertheless speaks compellingly from its cultural and political nexus. Darwish, like Yeats, understands that the quarrel with others produces rhetoric, the quarrel with oneself, poetry." Translation: Text and Context, reviewing books by Mahmoud Darwish and Fady Joudah
Harry Gilonis:
"There will... be those worried by the betrayal of the 'task of the translator'. When Ezra Pound first published his 'Homage to Sextus Propertius' a Professor of Latin was moved by lines like this—'Nor is it equipped with a frigidaire patent'—to write complaining of Pound's competence. The reply, beginning 'Cat-piss and porcupines!!', seems mild in the circumstances. I promise to respond in like vein to critics who manage to notice all by themselves that there were no tanks in Powys in the 850s. What is at issue is what Hugh Kenner called 'cultural subject-rhyme'—and, if it can be carried off, the topological transformation, as it were, of the 'co-ordinates' of the original poem. In any case, better mendacities than the classics in paraphrase. Yesterday cannot be today, for 'Wales cannot endlessly remain / chasing sheep into the twilight'. 'Not altogether dark': Some Remarks on My unHealed Poems
Michael Almereyda:
"Even at this distance—more than seventy-five years after his death and nearly twenty years after the collapse of the government he fervently promoted—it remains difficult to account for the phenomenal nature, the sheer outlandishness, of Vladimir Mayakovsky. As unofficial poet laureate of the Russian Revolution ("my revolution," he called it) Mayakovsky had unrivaled authority and glamour, taking on multiple responsibilities and roles—orator, playwright, magazine editor, stage and film actor, poster maker, jingle writer—with a singular mix of self-mockery and martyrdom." Introduction to Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky
Brenda Wineapple:
"'Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" Thomas Wentworth Higginson opened the cream-colored envelope as he walked home from the post office, where he had stopped on the mild spring morning of April 17 after watching young women lift dumbbells at the local gymnasium. The year was 1862, a war was raging, and Higginson, at thirty-eight, was the local authority on physical fitness. This was one of his causes, as were women's health and education. His passion, though, was for abolition. But dubious about President Lincoln's intentions—fighting to save the Union was not the same as fighting to abolish slavery—he had not yet put on a blue uniform. Perhaps he should.
Yet he was also a literary man (great consolation for inaction) and frequently published in the cultural magazine of the moment, The Atlantic Monthly, where, along with gymnastics, women's rights, and slavery, his subjects were flowers and birds and the changing seasons.
Out fell a letter, scrawled in a looping, difficult hand, as well as four poems and another, smaller envelope. With difficulty he deciphered the scribble. 'Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?'" Introduction to White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Charles Simic:
—They're not really object poems.
—What are they then?
—They are premonitions.
—About what?
—About the absolute otherness of the object.
—So, it's the absolute you've been thinking of?
—Of course.
Form is the visible side of content. The way in which the content becomes manifest. Form: Time turning into space and space turning into time simultaneously.
I admire Claude Levi Strauss's observation that all art is essentially reduction and Gertrude Stein's saying that poetry is vocabulary.
Chance as a tool with which to break up one's habitual associations. Once they're broken, use one of the pieces to launch yourself into the unknown.
We name one thing and then another. That's how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there's a lot of space inside words.
The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks
Don Paterson:
On the morning the Barbarians wandered through the gates, everyone in Rome had their feet up and was reading a foreword.
The aphorism is a brief waste of time. The poem is a complete waste of time. The novel is a monumental waste of time.
The aphorism: too much too soon or too little too late, but never just enough for the time being.
Yes I know Marcus Aurelius or Vauvenargues or Chesterton has already said this, and far more elegantly; but let's face it, you weren't listening then either.
Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work, and Death—Aphorisms
Lucia Perillo:
"In what computer people call the meat world, I wrote always in a place that had a window. Otherwise there's not much to say (a door rests on top of two filing cabinets that have been moved from window to window). Of more interest is the internal studio. What to call it—encephalic? Virtual? Made-from-meat-yet-not? The broodio? The stain?" No Exit
David Orr:
"Shortly before Ohio's Democratic primary, Tom Buffenbarger, the head of the machinists' union and a supporter of Hillary Clinton, took to the stage at a Clinton rally in Youngstown to lay the wood to Barack Obama. 'Give me a break!' snarled Buffenbarger, 'I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine.' And then the union rep delivered his coup de grace: 'He's a poet, not a fighter!'
"Ouch.
"Fortunately, this insult to the sacred mysteries of Poesie didn't go unanswered—within a few days, the poet John Lundberg angrily riposted at the Huffington Post, declaring that he "would be happy to step outside" with Buffenbarger to show him that poets can indeed mix it up." The Politics of Poetry
Stanley Plumly:
"... now that the newness of Rome has worn off and the reality of his illness escalated, Keats has entered not only his posthumous time but a posthumous space. He is beginning to realize that memory is all he has, and that memory, too, is killing him. He has been sent into exile, in effect alone with and among images of Tom and his sister and Fanny Brawne and friends he has disappointed and who have disappointed him. And now that, more and more, the small circumference of his outside, present world is getting smaller and smaller—like his window on the Spanish Steps and the lapping boat fountain and the noise of life in motion—and now that Rome itself—looming in its timelessness and ruins—feels like the afterlife and now that the very shape of his bedroom is taking on the shape and depth of a grave, with the patterned roses on the ceiling emblemizing what he will see there, now that his confinement is nearly complete, it is his mind that is all he has, because his body, within itself, is disappearing." Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography
Forrest Gander:
"Beijing
Twenty poets speaking seven languages on a field trip to the outskirts of Beijing. A birdless summer day, no insect whirr. We enter the gate of the Summer Palace as a horde, then dissolve into pairs. Without his Persian translator, Emran Salahi is pensive, mute. I trail him through The Hall of Dispelling Clouds, past its discolored statuary and dusty tapestries symbolizing, say the placards, eternal power. Wandering to the corner of a side room, I peer around a painted screen and find, in the back warren, an old man face-down on a table strewn with syringes.
Behind everything
I see, something I don't
Know how to look for."
David Rivard:
"Does Rimbaud matter anymore? Modernist frontiersman, punkrock avatar, Beat seer, hallucinatory trip master, psychosexual sailor, litterateur as homeless street urchin—after a century or more of reinterpretations and idolizing, Rimbaud's name echoes through literary life like that of a highly diversified brand. The escapades of writers like Hart Crane, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Mailer, Frank O'Hara, and Jim Carroll (not to mention their more studied descendants) have made the role of the voyant a kind of franchise. In a culture where the machinery of consumption scarfs up and then test-markets nearly every act of revolt and every critique directed at it—in an age when Attitude and Mania are the names of clothing lines sold by Armani—Rimbaud seems pretty harmless really, a costume more than an influence." A Note on Stephen Berg's Rimbaud: "... still unilluminated I ..."
William Logan:
From The New Criterion, the latest installment of William Logan's Verse Chronicle, reviewing recent books by Ted Kooser, Melissa Green, Elizabeth Spires, Campbell McGrath, Marie Howe, and Jorie Graham: Valentine's Day Massacre
Maureen N. McLane:
"Emily Dickinson: post-9/11 poet? I began to consider this question after returning to Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, her kaleidoscopic, deeply researched, brilliantly written 1985 tour-de-force, which has been reissued with a new introduction by Eliot Weinberger.... Howe's book is simultaneously a dazzling exploration of Dickinson’s power and an anatomy of the American cultural imaginary. 'The vivid rhetoric of terror,' Howe writes, 'was a first step in the slow process of American Democracy.' This rhetoric of terror—fueled by a double legacy of Calvinist predestinarianism and violent frontier experience—animates some of Dickinson’s best work." This Ecstatic Nation: Learning from Emily Dickinson after 9/11
Seamus Heaney:
"The history of poetry contains many accounts of what might be called poetic recognition scenes, meetings where the poet comes face to face with something or someone in the outer world recognized as vital to the poet's inner creative life, and accounts of these meetings represent some of the highest achievements in the art. When a practitioner describes an encounter with a living or dead master, or an equivalent moment of epiphany, something fundamental is usually at stake, often having to do with poetic vocation itself. At the level of autobiography, such scenes record crucial events in the growth or reorientation of the poet's mind; at the mythic level, on the other hand, they can be read as evidence of a close encounter between the poet and the muse." 'Apt Admonishment': Wordsworth As an Example
"What Is It Anyway?"
"Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley." (Charles Simic)
"Poetry is energy, it is an energy-storing and an energy-releasing device." (Miroslav Holub)
"Poetry is the eroticization of thought—psychic vitality." (Cal Bedient)
"A poem... is the attire of feeling: the literary form where words seem tailor-made for memory or desire." (Carol Ann Duffy)
"What Is It Anyway," from Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry, edited by Dennis O'Driscoll
Peter Campion:
"Criticism of protest poetry appears often enough to be familiar. But with two recent essays in response to Poets Against the War, both W. S. Di Piero and David Wojahn offer a more forceful articulation. They point to an irony: Not only does most protest poetry remain mere versified opinion, but it tends strangely to mirror the smugness it rails against... To understand the uniquely American directions such a quarrel can take, and to see how it can mount effective protest against the political structures we live inside, I want to look at two very different passages from Whitman." The Wolf, the Snake, the Hog, Not Wanting in Me: American Poetry and Political Protest
Willard Spiegelman:
"It's a clear fall day in mid-October, 1961. Outside, the leaves on the maple and gingko trees are fiery crimson, those of the oak bright yellow. Subtler shades also abound. Open windows give onto high school playing fields, from which the sounds of the marching a band, rehearsing for Friday's football game against our archrivals, float in. Eighteen of us—high school seniors bound mostly for Ivy League colleges and all biting our fingernails about applications whose outcomes we shall not know for another five months—are having the time of our lives. We are reading the Aeneid." Unforced Marches: A Virgilian Memoir, essay/review of The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles.
Robin Ekiss:
"Though widely admired in England and Ireland over the last forty years—and embraced by poets as diverse as Billy Collins and Stephen Spender—at eighty-two, New York poet Samuel Menashe has always faced difficulty placing his work with American publishers. In 2004 he was named the first "Neglected Master" by the Poetry Foundation, which arranged the publication the next year of a volume of new and selected poems published by the Library of America. As if to demonstrate the extent of his neglect, the New York Times misspelled his name in the caption beneath his photo in its announcement of the award." No Small Feat, reviewing Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks
David Wojahn:
"...we tend to be of two minds when we read poets' career-spanning collections, especially when we are revisiting in a new context the work of poets we've known before. On the one hand, Selecteds tempt us to impose a narrative, an archetype—we see the writer's promising (or wobbly) beginnings as often as not give way in midcareer to a new sort of authority and vitality... But... poets don't turn into butterflies; they don't typically get reborn like Saul on his way to Damascus. Instead, if they're fortunate, they get older. And perhaps, as their waistlines and CREF accounts expand, by increments, in a slow and compelling fashion that is ultimately just as mysterious as Berryman's oracular notion of reformation, they get better. Witness the four Selecteds under discussion here, all exemplary." By Increments, reviewing recent Selected Poems by Albert Goldbarth, Bruce Beasley, Carl Phillips, and Ellen Bryant Voigt
Stephen Burt:
"It seems to me that Kasischke has invented a new way for verse to sound. Her poems are like rollercoasters, full of gradual rises and emphatic drops; they set the wildly variable forward motion of her lines (sometimes a few syllables, sometimes a lengthy mouthful) against the kinds of closure produced by sentence-endings, echoes, and full rhymes." The Speed of Life, reviewing Lilies Without, by Laura Kasischke
Andrew Motion:
"Anne Stevenson is one of the most remarkable poetic voices to have emerged on either side of the Atlantic in the last fifty years. Her work covers an impressively wide range—from large-scale narratives to finely wrought lyrics—and is cleverly tuned to history but full of edgy individuality. In certain respects her achievement has been properly recognized: she has won several important prizes and generally found critical approval. Yet because she has never found the large general readership that she deserves, she can also be called a "neglected writer." Although the phrase has an inevitably melancholy ring to it, in Stevenson's case it is also proof of quality." Introduction to Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems
Herbert Leibowitz:
"In 1951 and 1952, William Carlos Williams suffered incapacitating strokes, what neurologists call insults to the brain. The first occurred on March 28, 1951 at home in 9 Ridge Road. Williams had been caught up in a whirligig of work, keeping office hours, pushing himself to complete and revise his Autobiography, giving a series of readings along the Northeast Corridor from The New School to Yale to Wellesley College, including a benefit for an ailing Kenneth Patchen, a New Directions poet too poor to afford insurance. Such a schedule might have fazed a man half his age. The stroke that left his speech slurred and his eyesight askew sent Williams in critical condition to the Intensive Care Unit at Passaic General Hospital." The Lion in Winter
Floyd Collins:
"Philip Schultz writes a poetry of embattled celebration, avidly embracing an aesthetic composing equal portions of dross and ether. Who else among contemporary poets harbors a guardian angel named Stein, a shabbily pinioned seraph whose breath reeks of pickled herring, a self-proclaimed 'flatulent Talmudist / seized with Solomonic wisdom'?... a wry and sometimes raucous sense of humor prevents his poetry from lapsing into the solipsistic maunderings so characteristic of the Confessional mode. To write of one's personal obsessions and abiding passions, particularly in light of an irretrievable past, requires a measure of courage and dignity that Schultz possesses in abundance." Embattled Celebration: The Recent Poetry of Philip Schultz
Mark Ford:
"'I love your poems in Poetry,' James Schuyler wrote to Frank O'Hara after reading a batch that included 'Radio' and 'On Seeing Larry Rivers's Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art' in the March 1956 issue of the Chicago magazine. 'In that cutting garden of salmon pink gladioli,' he continued, 'they're as fresh as a Norway spruce. Your passion always makes me feel like a cloud the wind detaches (at last) from a mountain so I can finally go sailing over all those valleys with their crazy farms and towns. I always start bouncing up and down in my chair when I read a poem of yours like "Radio," where you seem to say, "I know you won't think this is much of a subject for a poem but I just can't help it: I feel like this," so that in the end you seem to be the only one who knows what the subject for a poem is.'" Introduction to Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems
Jacquelyn Pope:
"'I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood,' wrote Audre Lorde in her essay, 'The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.' Poet, activist and icon, Lorde profoundly shaped the women's and gay liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and her words resonate powerfully today. This comprehensive biography, the first about Lorde to be published, fully renders Lorde's life and legacy, providing a vivid account of the development of her activism and documenting the evolution of her ideas over the course of her working life." Review of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde
Peter Gizzi:
"I guess I am suggesting here the role of not-knowing that plays itself out in the writing of poetry. That this not-knowing plays a signal role in the production of reality in a poem. I like the word bewilderment because it has both be and wild in it, and I can imagine also wilderness inside it as well. As to certainty or authority in my work, I prefer the word inevitability—that is to say, meaning in a poem can be at once random and inevitable, and not-knowing can come to some sort of order that allows meaning to happen, mystery. A simpler way to say this is that I write to discover what I might know only in the act of making the poem itself." Interview with Robert N. Caspar
Roger Gilbert:
"We stand at the threshold of a Golden Age of octogenarian poetry. Even if we make allowances for changing life spans, such poetry was extremely scarce before the twentieth century. Few of the great poets who survived to old age produced enduring work in the latter part of their lives... But now the floodgates are about to open wide, as the extraordinarily rich generation of American poets born between 1925 and 1930 reaches the eighty-year milestone... Within this distinguished cohort, the four poets under review have achieved particular prominence. John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and Adrienne Rich may seem like an oddly matched quartet, yet while their styles and commitments differ in fundamental ways, all four of them enjoy the closest thing to stardom that our culture affords its poets." Whiz Kids at Eighty (I), reviewing recent collections by Robert Bly and Donald Hall
Paul Dean:
"Any biographer of Ezra Pound needs a clear head, a cool and dispassionate style, and first-rate literary-critical powers. Of David Moody's two predecessors, Noel Stock (1960) had only the first two, and was inhibited by the control exercised over his work by Pound's widow, while Humphrey Carpenter (1988) had the first two, but not consistently—his readability coming at the price of some journalistic slickness—and did not pretend to the third. Moody has all three. His book, the first of two volumes, will be a godsend to people like myself, who have spent decades feeling obscurely guilty about their lack of enthusiasm for Pound, and wondering why others, whose judgment they admire, hold him in high regard." Luminous Details, reviewing Ezra Pound: Poet, Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920
Linda Gregerson:
"Poets love to construe themselves as oppositional, at odds with public decorums and public affairs. But recent decades suggest that American poets are no longer convinced that civic scale and private consciousness, philosophical reach and local idiom, historical imagination and lyric authenticity, are inherently inimical to one another. Nor that public speaking must suppress an active and critical mind." Ode and Empire
James Longenbach:
"In every case, however the line is shaped, what will matter is not the line as such but the relationship of the line to the poem's syntax—to the unfolding structure of the poem's sentences. That relationship is endlessly various. Short lines or long lines don’t inevitably function in any particular way. A rhyming line doesn't necessarily function differently from a free-verse line. In the end, line doesn’t exist as a principle in itself. Line has a meaningful identity only when we begin to hear its relationship to other elements in the poem." Excerpt from The Art of the Poetic Line
Eric LeMay:
"Maybe they're right. Maybe there's much to celebrate about a room full of young people who are aware of the demands love makes, who don't buy the lacy lies we tell on Valentine's Day or after a hit of ecstasy. Believing love is work is certainly better than believing it's effortless, ceaseless bliss. So maybe I should feel relieved that my students aren't willing to see two teenagers who meet at a banquet, dance once, flirt, get engaged, deceive their parents, marry, have sex, commit multiple murders, fake death, then die in an exquisite double suicide aren't really in love."
Star-Crossed Something-or-Others
Adam Kirsch:
"Once the modern poet has been defined... not as his age's interpreter but as its exemplary specimen or willing victim, all the virtues and vices of modern poetry, up to the present day, become almost inevitable. The virtues are daring honesty, subtle self-knowledge, an intimate (if not always explicit) concern with history, and a determination to make language serve as the most accurate possible instrument of communication, even at the risk of estrangement. The vices, which correspond to the virtues and call them into question, are sentimental egotism, an obsession with staying up-to-date, and a belief that distortion of language is interesting and praiseworthy in its own right." Introduction to The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry
