Alicia Ostriker:
"John Newton, the reformed slave trader who wrote 'Amazing Grace,' was telling his own life story. But something else is happening in the opening line of the hymn as it performs what it describes, even for a relative non-wretch like me. There is a sense that prayer is itself the 'answer' to prayer, and in just the same way, "Amazing Grace" becomes operative." 'Amazing Grace': Singer and Song
Marianne Boruch:
"Just to be clear: I straight out love Simic's poems; they turn and rewind, then: look! And how skewed but normal (really?) his stuff seems, fated and hopeless and ancient and new. Of course it's a spell, of sorts, and that's joy, his surprise, his grounded weirdness. I'm writing this off the top of my head which I fear opens not like a sturdy envelope but an old Pez dispenser, a sweet minor offering because it's late May, the northern hemisphere overwhelmed with the season's standard amazement: trees sudden into leaf, flowers knowing exactly what to do with blue and red and yellow.... "Bent as I Was, Intently..."
Michael Bazzett:
"Somewhere in a highland cloud forest in the middle 1500s, near the place where the continents of the Americas hinge upon their mountainous spine, a story was written down. The marks were likely made on paper made from bark, with ink darkened by soot. This story was already many centuries old—thousands of years, in fact—and it was etched into the hearts of the scribe or scribes who wrote it. It no doubt tripped readily from their lips in an incantatory rhythm. And it was written down secretly, line by line, the phonetic rendering of a living pulse, and spirited away. So the story goes... For a century and a half, no outsiders saw this book. Not a whisper of it appears anywhere." Introduction to The Popol Vuh
Michael McGriff:
"I had all these things cooking anyway, but the book sparked into life when I was at the Portland Art Museum and I saw the painting “Early Hour”, by Karl Hofer who was a German Expressionist painter who I really had no knowledge about, but this painting kind of caught me dead in my tracks. The more I looked at it the more I was totally overwhelmed by it, and mostly because it seems, on first glimpse, to be a pretty ordinary European painting. You know, it’s a naked guy and a naked woman in bed and in repose; they’ve got a dog at their feet. There’s a landscape in the background. But there’s just something spooky about it, and the guy starts to look really deathly the more you look at him. You know, then you look on the placard: it was painted in 1935, the guy’s a German, and then all of history sort of triangulates the foreboding tones." An Interview by Ben Evans
Olivia Lott:
"Tristan Tzara’s name may be synonymous with the world of Dada: the radical art—or, rather, anti-art—movement of the 1920s European avant-garde. Dada’s appeal tends to overshadow the hugely influential role that his poetry has played among international circles of experimental writers. This is perhaps most evident in the fact that we have surprisingly little access to Tzara’s post-Dada work in English translation. Simply put: Noontimes Won, translated by Heather Green, is a collection that readers of radical poetry have been waiting for." Tristan Tzara's Noontimes Won
Jena Schmitt:
"While reading New Collected Poems by Marianne Moore, edited by Heather Cass and published by Faber & Faber in 2017, I found myself making lists, lists of the people and places and things from within Moore’s poems. First and foremost, there are animals – pigeons, buffalo, pelicans, basilisks, swans, nightingales, octopuses, snakes, mules, beavers, antelopes, pangolins. There are nectarines and plums, orchids and palm trees; views of Boston, Fujiyama, Thebes, Pompeii; references to Queen Elizabeth, Dante, Francis Bacon, Pliny, an elderly gentleman playing a game of chess..." Like Armour
Christian Wiman:
"I stayed up late last night reading the letters of A. R. Ammons, who for years sowed and savored his loneliness in lonely Ithaca. 'Keep Ithaka always in your mind,' wrote Constantin Cavafy, 'Arriving there is what you're destined for.' And he did, Ammons, keep that mythical Ithaka in his mind, which is to say in his poems, decade after decade of diaristic ramblings that are as flavorless as old oatmeal this morning, as null and undifferentiated as deep space—then lit up suddenly by a meteoric masterpiece that must have surprised the workaday writer as much as it does the fatigued reader." from He Held Radical Light
Gerard Smyth:
"Harpur has a flair for creating a compound of the everyday and the numinous; while the tone may be reserved and quiet, his imagination is dynamic; he comprehends the mystic without being mystical and demonstrates this through avoidance of the kind of solemnity that this kind of subject matter might draw to itself in other hands." Gazing Heavenwards
Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani:
"RN, FWIW
By the time this appears in print, it will have been well over a year since two Google Homes were live-streamed talking to each other on Twitch. Like anything that happens on the Internet, this event will have faded behind a host of new blips on our collective radar, themselves about to give way to newer ones. But when we pause to more closely examine this moment, we find—as we do with much of the web's strange detritus—that even the most minute, passing moments online can carry new intelligence on the future of writing, literature, and text-based art in America." Introduction to BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing
Grace Schulman:
"[T]he only visitor who did not intimidate me was Marianne Moore, whom my parents met through Ted Kauffer, the designer of one of her books.... Inspired by her and by Glenway Wescott, I wrote my first poems and sent them to her. She wrote back, 'The flawless typing shows the work to its very best advantage and is in itself a great pleasure.' It was my introduction to her way of dodging a negative response. She spoke truth tactfully, and with a positive spin."
Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage
Rosanna Warren:
"Literature is only one of the symbolic structures of meaning that homo sapiens has learned to make. Literature is storytelling and song. I think that truly to experience a work of literature, whether it's written or oral, is to be mobilized as a whole person—our feelings, our intellect, our confusions, our clarities, our sense of ourselves as physical beings. We can be mobilized and integrated by a great work of literature if we allow ourselves to be." An Interview with Rosanna Warren by Ernest Suarez
John Clegg:
"It hadn't struck me before ... that the particular pub for which time is called in The Waste Land might be tracked down. It took me a few minutes of Googling building records. It's the Larrik on Crawford Place, in Eliot's time the Laurie Arms. The present owners are, I believe, unaware that they occupy what might be the most famous licenced premises in English literature. I went there one evening with the poet James Brookes, with the intention of staying until closing time and hearing them call last orders. We arrived just before the kitchen closed, shared a rack of ribs and a piece of key lime pie, got in a couple more drinks and 'fell to talking of this's and that's'. At twenty to eleven, Jim had a delve in his substantial rucksack and withdrew Valerie Eliot's facsimile edition of The Waste Land and asked whether anything else in the poem might be similarly pinpointed." Some Investigation and Digression
Will Stone:
"Trakl’s poems have been variously termed mood paintings, tonal poems, impressionist collages or colour-coded dream images. They are the work of a rare visionary, whose emergence at a specific point in European history, at a vital schism between the old order and the new, lends the work a special insistence and uncanny timelessness. His poems overwhelm in both a visual and an audible sense, their imagery mystical yet muscular and uncompromisingly apocalyptic." Georg Trakl: A Visionary Poet in Europe
John F. Deane:
"By poems being 'given,' I mean poems—indeed phrases and images and the music of poems—that appear to arrive unexpectedly to the poet from outside the self, poems that appear to write themselves. In former times we would have spoken about the Holy Spirit taking one over and almost dictating the work, inspired Scripture; it was total 'inspiration,' it was an 'inbreathing'. I believe, with T.S. Eliot, that such incoming arrives after much work, much thought, reading, experience, even preliminary notes and drafts. But that the final, achieved work emerges quickly as a rose blossoming suddenly on the end of a thorny stem." Poetry, Place, and Prophecy: An Interview with John F. Deane
Magdalena Kay:
"In Rising Late, Derek Mahon’s signature formalism is on full display. And it is a delight. The poet himself seems to take pleasure from his verse forms, which rearrange the structural units of English poetry into combinations new enough to surprise the reader and recognisable enough that their dialogue with tradition is clear. Indeed 'tradition' is too stodgy, too compromised a word to really serve us any longer in the twenty-first century, when our traditions of innovation and avant-gardism are so numerous. Tradition is nothing if not malleable, and Mahon’s tradition is a site of play." Through to Delight
Marianne Boruch:
"Because past the angel at the gate, oh can turn like that, go under, straight into poetry.
Here's the god's honest: a moment of calm recently came to me, so close to sleep it was sleep. In my dream I saw a girl whose dark t-shirt read: All is Failure. Except "failure" was misspelled—part of the dream too—either "far-lure" or "fear-lure." The words still blur. But thank you, whatever sent that.
Because now I accept far or fear as the real F words, both part of lure and—most of all—that F as failure, as in all is failure, a triumph. I hands-down love that, everything made of failure, triggered first by failure, seen in its light, built—at least poetry often is—by one first failed turn of phrase after another, stanza and more stanzas in a standing pool of white space until a serious full draft lies there flat. Failure as blank check and ice floe into inner space. Is this what it is to see clearly?" Oh No
Rigoberto González:
"I subscribe to the notion that land carries memory, so people are never truly gone, not with so many prints and impressions left behind. Our actions, positive and negative, become absorbed by the land. This is how we simultaneously nurture and poison the ground beneath our feet." Unpeopled Edens
Seán Hewitt:
"The planchette on the cover of Tara Bergin's much-anticipated second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx, along with the small illustrations of women and spirits at Ouija boards that sit in the comers, suggest the aloofness with which Bergin herself stands behind her own poems, creating masks and voices, using found texts and stories, in repeated acts of poetic mediumship and invention. At the heart of the book is the suicide in 1898 of Eleanor Marx, sociologist, daughter of Karl Marx, and first translator of Madame Bovary into English. After finding that her partner, Edward Aveling, had secretly married a young actress, Eleanor changed into her favourite summer dress and then killed herself using the same poison as that used by Emma Bovary in Flaubert's novel. In this book, Tara Bergin invokes the voices of Karl Marx's daughters, Edward Aveling, and the characters from Madame Bovary, and she approaches her major themes (love, death, grief) through what the book's epigraph (from Marianne Moore) describes as 'illusion'." Not Simple or Pretty
Julie Kane:
"Those who follow New Orleans music will tell you that some of the most gifted artists of the previous century are little known beyond the borders of the city precisely because they could not bear to leave it. The same holds true for Maxine Cassin, one of the city's finest poets." Maxine Cassin (1927-2010)
J. D. McClatchy:
"It was not until prep school that I discovered how to read properly, and I owe the discovery to a madman... our teacher did not think we could truly understand Homer, or his hero’s trials, unless we duplicated the circumstances of the poem. To that end, we were told to go each night to the basement of our homes, with a lighted candle and a bowl of applesauce (for its Hellenic tang)—and, between gulped spoonfuls, declaim the Greek, pretending we were in the dank, dark hold of a storm-tossed ship. I was never, before or since, so enthralled to a text. I now realize that what excited me then was not just the story or the theatrics. It was the words themselves." Reading
Beverley Bie Brahic:
"Roaming the library stacks makes me uneasy. Too many books I haven't read. The flesh is sad? Alas. But I've read all the books? Not even close. Getting my bearings in the third (literature) floor's musty pulp-and-paper-smelling undergrowth, I file down a narrow path between stacks to tip a few more books from the shelf." Darning
Alex Albright:
"... everywhere the poet seeks out borders and edges, peripheries and the margins that 'are places for things to happen,' as he tries to reconcile the conflicting pulls of unity and diversity, the common and mystical, order and chaos. He admires the newly plowed and planted field but wants 'to disk up an acre by mistake'; he loves his birds but has an urge to find 'the roosts / of birds, flush them & hear / the shrieks of panic.'" Cool Control of Syllables (reviewing The Complete Poems of
A. R. Ammons)
Robert Crossley:
"'Mr. Crossley, there is only one way to read Paradise Lost. You must climb a mountain and read it all aloud, from morn to dewy eve.' A smile started to lift the corners of his pursed lips. There were, of course, no mountains convenient to Kansas City... I left college still innocent of Miltonic knowledge." My Ever New Delight: The Pleasures of Paradise Lost
Tony Hoagland:
"The poet Henri Cole ... has undertaken the work of transformation several times since publishing his first collection in 1986. In both style and subject matter, his work has changed, and his last four or five books—vivid and adventurous, intense, and psychologically complex—place him among the best American poets of our time." Beyond Claustrophobia: The Poems of Henri Cole
Sam Ross:
"How do we find pleasure—and accept it—in a world where grief is a certainty? And if we can’t, what might we lose? I found myself thinking of pleasure, peril, and the gathering of a motley crew while reading Rocket Fantastic, the third book of poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi." On Rocket Fantastic by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
A. E. Stallings:
"The heart of the tome is 'The Man and His Book,' a history of A Shropshire Lad, from its fizzled launch to its phenomenon of popularity, as well as a life of Housman, covered with efficiency and thoroughness; the volume is worth the price for this book-within-a-book alone." Cool Pastoral
Tomas Unger:
"Frank Bidart is a poet of terrible, overmastering pity. Half-light, which collects a half-century of his poetry, presents us with the extraordinary record of his effort to make something commensurate with the complexity of the human psyche as it struggles to know itself over time. He has evoked Frost in describing his ambition to "fasten the voice to the page," and from his first book onward, Bidart's radically precise typography—which makes use of spacing, block letters, italics—hazards everything to try to make language adequate to the task of dramatizing both the speaking voice and the brooding consciousness." Poet of the Incommensurate
Harry Clifton:
"There is a longer and shorter commentary to be written on the poems of the late Dennis O’Driscoll, who passed away five years ago and whose work now appears in collected form. The shorter version tells us that O’Driscoll, who grew up in Tipperary and moved to Dublin in 1970, quickly assimilated the mode and manner of translated Eastern European poetry at the time and applied it to the domestic and professional realities of the Ireland he lived and worked in as a civil servant, initially in Births, Marriages and Deaths, latterly in Customs and Excise, for nearly forty years... The longer version is more complex..." The Poems of Dennis O'Driscoll
T. R. Hummer:
"I didn’t retire from poetry. Poetry has many times retired from me. It moves me, as it is meant to, though not usually into a place of safety or storage—more often it has taken me to dangerous places, or unknown ones, parachuting me into strange terrain without an adequate road map (like GPS in the early days, it always promised I wouldn’t get lost, but...)." The Poet Retires
Gregory Orr:
"This small book represents one poet’s informal exploration of language and self in relation to the impulse to write lyric poetry. I think of it as a series of brief provocations presented in the hope that they will lead the young poet or reader toward an active response of his or her own. If it encourages you to write poems, or if it clarifies your personal engagement with and excitement about poetry, then it will have succeeded."' A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry
Robert Cording:
"I often ask my students to write a statement of what they believe and what they would like their writing to accomplish. In that spirit, here’s my own little credo. I believe words evoke and depend on a reality apart from the acts of verbal reference, although poetry and, to my mind, theology are as Wallace Stevens said, 'a revelation in words by means of words.' I write, first and foremost, to honor the mystery of creation....'' Cloud Shapes and Oak Trees
Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado:
"The speaker of a poem from Leontia Flynn’s 2004 debut collection, These Days, memorably surmises, “the furthest distances I’ve travelled / have been those between people.” Lines of communication are a central preoccupation of Flynn’s oeuvre, which uses poetic lines to probe the spaces between people. Occasionally poetry can bridge these gaps, even if this connection only occurs within the mind of the speaker or reader. As its title indicates, Flynn’s new collection, The Radio (2017), gives primacy to the theme of receptivity.''
Homing Signals
Jacqueline Osherow:
"An obsession, a suspicion, a likeness, a connection, a mystery, an inconsistency, a failing, an injustice, a loss, a glimpse, a change—any of these—if it holds on to me long enough, might make me want to write a poem. If there's anything 'typical' it's the tenacity of the thing, its unwillingness to let me go. Writing this (I have a tendency to reach for the nearest Biblical allusion) I'm immediately put in mind of Jacob, saying to his adversary/angel, 'I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.' I was named for my grandfather, Jacob, and have, despite his obvious underhandedness, always pitied my Biblical namesake, the way he had to work so hard for every blessing. Who knows? Maybe I experience a poem as an angel with whom I have to wrestle in the hope of that ever-elusive blessing. Except, in my case, it's the angel who won't let me go.'' An Interview
Lesley Wheeler:
"'He told me I was your companion pony,' Claudia said.
"In the fall of 1994, Claudia Emerson and I worked in a neoclassical building whose three-story white columns were annually draped in black crepe, to commemorate Robert E. Lee's birthday. 'He' was another youngish professor employed by our department, and when you teach at a small college in a small town, your colleagues are inescapable. More than two decades later, the grocery store is still jammed with faculty members surveying the contents of each other's carts. Claudia joked that if you ducked into Harris Teeter on a Tuesday to buy tater tots and beer, you'd better be prepared for the Dean on line behind you, registering your lack of ambition for the evening.
"'You know how they keep a pony around as company for the racehorse?' the guy asked, maybe in the freezer aisle. 'Well, Lesley's the racehorse.'''
Women Stay Put
Drew Swinger:
"The Aeneid—that 10,000-line, 2,000-year-old epic poem in twelve books singing imperial Rome’s mythic origins in the travails and triumph of one man, Aeneas, Trojan hero second only to Hector; that touchstone of Western culture T. S. Eliot once called “the classic of all Europe”; that capstone of high school Latin. Even if you have never read it, you probably know of the Trojan Horse and to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. For many, poets and scholars alike, translating the Aeneidrepresents a culmination of effort and height of achievement. Ferry himself, who has already translated to much acclaim Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, has now completely traced the arc of Virgil’s career from writer of lyrics and didactic verse to epic poet in the mode of Virgil’s great predecessor, Homer." Here As I Am
Eavan Boland:
"And so, a contradiction emerges, one almost unique in recent poetry. In his love for French poetry, his surreal affinities, Ashbery could appear a member in good standing with the post-modern mandarin group, a stylistic coterie that cared little for audience and resolutely disdained the search for so-called 'meaning'. But in his vernacular style, his superb championship of the common speech, the beautiful music of the familiar phrase that wanders radiantly through his lines, Ashbery emerged as almost the opposite: as one of the great democrats of twentieth-century poetry. The haunting and humane music of his best poems confirms that."
John Ashbery (1927-2017)
Daniel Swift:
"By May of 1945, when the soldiers came for him with guns, Ezra Pound had been living in Italy for twenty years. His was a generation of American writers who went abroad, but his entanglement in Europe was a little more extreme. In January 1941—the year America entered the war—he began a series of radio broadcasts from Rome. He discussed monetary reform, his poetry and, most of all, the folly of this fight against the Axis powers; and he broadcast perhaps 200 times—rambling, passionate, in accents and impersonations—before 26 July 1943, when the US Department of Justice indicted him for treason. This charge carries the death penalty. Pound continued to broadcast." Prologue to The Bughouse
Katharine Ogle:
"The book takes its title from the Greek root –orexia meaning “physical desire” and “appetite.” In English, we encounter this word nestled inside its opposite: the term anorexia, which refers to a lack of appetite. Spaar’s work hunts for words hidden within others. The first line of a poem titled “Trust Hour” reads: “The rust in it.” Spaar calls our attention to “the etched in wretched” and “the burr in worry, ‘r’s’ like hitchhiker seeds, / arcing lures that bend, twist away[.] ... The appetite which is this work’s engine, then, is not appetite in the traditional sense—hunger, the desire for food—but rather, an appetite that acts as a driving force, like eros, a reason, a direction with which we seek the world." Carnage Always in Any Talk
Sven Birkerts:
"Joseph was usually first out of the box with some dark jibe, which would inevitably set Derek into volatile contortions, releasing his extraordinary laugh, a full-body explosion. It would then fall to Seamus to offer the judicious sardonic rejoinder. I wished I could have brought it all home in a jar. My stomach hurt from laughing. I lay in bed, my head spinning from combined excesses, but also with the feeling that the world was, as Frost had it, 'the right place for love.'"
Derek Walcott at BU: A Sorting [Start 2018]
Ange Mlinko:
"It was Robert Frost who said, in a letter, 'in verse as in trapeze performance is all.' Is it any surprise then to read of Marianne Moore that she kept a trapeze in her house — 'mystifying visitors,' writes her biographer, Linda Leavell? Moore was a consummate performer in her work (the biography is even called Holding on Upside Down), and she admired athletes in particular, having famously pitched the first ball of the season at Yankee Stadium in 1968, and having written the liner notes for I Am the Greatest! by Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali)." Willing to Be Reckless
Stephen Yenser:
"Robert Pinsky’s new volume of poems, richly titled At the Foundling Hospital, delicately but persistently works in two ways at once. At the same time that it is a series of different kinds of what we casually call “lyric” poems, it is a constellation of musings on a number of subtly related motifs. Among these motifs are foundlings, slaves, ancestors, musical instruments, shells, threads and other filaments and filiations, names – all surprisingly reticulated terms, a little, ultimately uncontainable lexical tribe – and (almost inevitably) language itself, especially in its etymological dimension." Poetry in Review
Lawrence Raab:
"'It is true,' Emily Dickinson wrote, 'that the unknown is the largest need of the intellect, though for it, no one thinks to thank God.' Following her lead, we might also wish to thank God for his unwillingness to reveal himself, for all that is hidden, and for the value, finally, of not knowing. And then we should be grateful as well for those works of art that appear to present their true and authentic selves only to undermine our confidence upon a closer reading, and so make larger and more surprising demands on our imaginations." Not Knowing
Daniel Nester:
"Lately I’ve thought that it might be time for a Diane Wakoski reassessment... Wakoski’s reputation and reception have fascinated me ever since I first picked up a copy of her 1971 collection, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems, at a used bookstore in Philadelphia. It was 1988. I was a college sophomore at work on my first serious poems. Across the Delaware River, I took classes at Rutgers-Camden, where the reading lists included dead white males with Sylvia Plath tacked at the end. I bought The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems largely based on its cover: the poet and a pair of low ape-hanger cycle handlebars in kaleidoscopic triple exposure, and a dedication that took up the top third of its cover:
This book is dedicated to
all those men who betrayed
me at one time or another,
in hopes they will fall off
their motorcycles and
break their necks."
Emily Wilson:
"The gendered metaphor of the 'faithful' translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original, acquires a particular edge in the context of a translation by a woman of The Odyssey, a poem that is deeply invested in female fidelity and male dominance. I have taken very seriously the task of understanding the language of the original text as deeply as I can, and working through what Homer may have meant in archaic and classical Greece. I have also taken seriously the task of creating a new and coherent English text, which conveys something of that understanding but operates within an entirely different cultural context. The Homeric text grows inside my translation, like Athena's olive tree inside the bed made by Odysseus, 'with delicate long leaves, full-grown and green, / as sturdy as a pillar.'" Translator's Note to The Odyssey
Jonathan Blunk:
"He knew he had to write one last poem before he could quit. Thirty years old, he had tried many times to give it up, but now he swore to the Muse that he was through. On the morning of July 22, 1958, James Wright began 'His Farewell to Poetry.'" Prologue to James Wright: A Life in Poetry
Alicia Ostriker:
"I am writing this essay to unravel what is for me a mystery: in a poem already stunning in its force, why do its final two lines seem to me not simply powerful but immeasurably deep? Why is it that when I try to say these lines aloud, either in German or in English, my voice cracks and my eyes fill with tears? What is haunting me?" Celan's Deathfugue and the Eternal Feminine
Karin Roffman:
"John Ashbery and I met at Bard College in the spring of 2005, when he visited a class I was teaching on modernist poetry and painting. Not long after, he and his partner, David Kermani, invited me to their nearby home. I was expecting a midcentury-modern glass cube and found instead a large, gloomy-looking nineteenth-century Victorian manse. One gray afternoon, I stood on their portico and rang the bell for the first time. Inside, tiny slits of natural light illuminated corners and crevices, but the large center hallway was otherwise very dark. As my eyes adjusted, I could see small and curious objects, many with unusual shapes and textures, covering mantels and tabletops. At some point, as I was feeling both enveloped by darkness and overstimulated by my new surroundings, Ashbery appeared." Preface to The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life
Sharon Dolin:
"What does ekphrasis do for poets? All poets have their subject matter, and it will out, like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hands. Be it love, mortality, family trauma, social injustice, or spiritual doubt, a poet brings her concerns, her passions, her obsessions to her work. With ekphrasis, a poet has the opportunity to enrich her palette: to talk about what preoccupies her by deliberately displacing it onto something external." The Ekphrastic Moment
Tony Roberts:
"There is a moment in A Little Book on Form in which Robert Hass offers his students (and now readers) 'a small exercise. Take an afternoon and reread Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and "Immortality Ode" and maybe one other Wordsworth ode or the first book of The Prelude and Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and his "Dejection: An Ode" and then read—written about twenty-two years later, the five Keats odes—"Psyche," "Melancholy," "Nightingale,", "Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn.''' One's first reaction is that this is a demanding workout—but there is a point to it: 'I don't know if you will share my experience of them, but I found that when reading them in that order, the striking thing about the Keats poems was that they seemed so beautifully finished and a little old-fashioned.'"
The Poetry Gym
Nate Klug:
"... can anything be 'fresh or new' which happens again? Since I began writing, the only act more difficult than making a poem has been revising it. Some of my most pathetic hours have been spent trying to re-inhabit the sound-chains and image-jumps that admitted me once, like a temporary password, to a secret order."
Revision and Revenge
Sean O'Hogain:
"Michael Longley has said that he hopes that by the time he dies his work will look like four really long poems: 'a very long love poem; a very long meditation on war and death; a very long nature poem and a playful poem on the art of poetry'. While one should be mindful of DH Lawrence’s advice to 'never trust the artist; trust the tale', Longley’s remarks are still a useful tool in approaching his latest collection, Angel Hill." A Soul in Wonder
Frank Bidart:
"The solutions that I felt I found aren't going to be the solutions that work for someone else. But I'll be happy if my poems seem to say to younger writers that you still can be as bold about setting a poem down on the page as Wordsworth was or Mallarmé was or Ben Jonson was or Pound was or Ginsberg and Lowell and Bishop were. Getting the dynamics and voice down are what's crucial. Whatever it takes to get the whole soul into a poem." Interview with Shara Lessley
Mark Irwin:
"The poet resembles the paramedic in that she or he arrives first at the accident of language. The unexpected forces new arrivals. Poetry is born of crisis or will seek it, often beginning in medias res—the middle where danger lies, and where the attention of the poet becomes conditional and vulnerable to subject matter. Crisis expands language through experience. Poetry embraces chaos and the unexpected as it transforms space through language and redefines place, renewing our relationship to reality. By confronting, accessing, and engaging the present, the poet strives to find an everywhere at once and seeks an emergency through language." The Emergency of Poetry
Peter Parker:
"It is to the young that the poems’ prevailing mood of romantic melancholy, their depiction of thwarted or unrequited love, and their railing against the injustices of life have always had a special appeal. ‘I don’t know how it is with the young today,’ wrote W.H. Auden in 1972, ‘but to my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent.’ George Orwell concurred ..." England in Your Pocket
Adam Zagajewski:
"I can't write poems in recent weeks either. It's not the first time it's happened. And it's not worth going on about either. There's not much to tell. Karol Berger found something Victor Hugo said on the subject—he told me about it as we were walking in Paris, in the 16ème. When someone asked him how hard it was to write poetry, he answered, 'When you can write it, it’s easy, when you can't, it's impossible.'"
Slight Exaggeration
Scott Beauchamp:
"Miłosz notoriously bore witness to the most cataclysmic events of twentieth century Europe. It isn’t simply that his first-hand experience of these calamities – the Russian Revolution, Great War, Polish-Russian war and Second World War – is more overt in his writing than the work of many other poets and essayists, although that’s true. It’s also the case that Miłosz re-envisioned these monstrous events on a more human scale with the honest immediacy of his own experience and rich moral imagination. And so the relationship between his biography and his art is subtly profound, each affirming the other in a wild reciprocity." At Home in Exile
Robert Hahn:
"If only it all had been true, if the visions of sublimity had not turned out to be delusions: apparitions of meaning that were replaced—by what? This is the question the book raises repeatedly and exasperatedly. Is there something else? Or is there—as the book’s last words have it—nothing there?" Nothing There: The Late Poetry of John Koethe
David Biespiel:
"Unlike Heaney, whose poetry he reveres, Wiman is not a jittery seer. There's woe and bliss, partner, bliss and woe. But as makes sense for a poet who makes no objections about both the necessity of tradition and disrupting it, Wiman beguiles with precision. The edges of perception are smooth, tapered—at once transparent and dense and twinkling like an oil painting—as a way of advancing his own version of human consciousness. In fact, his concentration rarely fails, and his talent as a poet of spiritual argument is unsurpassed among living American poets."
Legible Horizon
Meghan O'Rourke:
"Why does a book-length poem called Riot (1969), which details the civic unrest in 1968 Chicago after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, conclude with not a bang, as it were, but with an intimate domestic scene between two lovers?"
The Eros in Democracy
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin:
"Harry Clifton has been for decades a poet who uses a wide angle lens. Responding partly it seems to a generational impulse (to differentiate himself from older poets identified, incestuously twinned even, with their Irish origins), he has been pushed or drawn to see the Irish scene from a distance ... But he did return after living on various continents, more immediately after ten years in Paris, to take up a perch near his boyhood home, in an agreeably shifty quarter of Dublin." The Return
Alexandra Mullen:
"Hardy country is wind- and rain-swept Wessex, far from the madding crowd, where life's little ironies and the grim workings of chance and fate grind themselves out in fields of punctured sheep against the uncaring arena of Stonehenge. Or so I, despite reading many hundreds of pages of Hardy, would have trotted out if asked, this despite the fact that I knew perfectly well Hardy had worked in London, had lived in London, had quite enjoyed being famous in London, and is even half-buried in London. The scholar, poet, and essayist Mark Ford has pondered these facts seriously, with the result that he presents us with a new vision of London as Hardy country too." Thomas Hardy Goes to Town
Eavan Boland:
"Brigit Pegeen Kelly's death in October 2016 took away one of the finest living poets. Her three books offer exemplary work. In poem after poem she displays a rare ability to complicate the lyric. She fashions a speaker who resists becoming a self. She pushes her poems towards a hermetic zeal no one had visited with more purpose since Emily Dickinson... And yet there was an odd, almost eerie silence around her death. As if no one could hit on an accurate language to describe her loss." Brigit Pegeen Kelly (1951-2016)
Stephen Burt:
"I got into New Zealand poetry — and, eventually, got to New Zealand — through my admiration of James K. Baxter (1926-72), the poet who (as I have been telling Americans over and over for twenty-five years) was for New Zealand almost what Walt Whitman, and Robert Lowell, and Allen Ginsberg, were for the US."
Letter from New Zealand
Paul Muldoon:
"I don't really want to be a public figure. I'm just not interested in that. I want a bit of peace and quiet. I don't want, at the age of 65, to be a public figure. Seriously. You know what I'm saying? I want to have a snooze." An Interview
August Kleinzahler:
"I remember immediately liking Allen, somewhat to my surprise. He was nothing at all like his cartoonish public persona. In fact, he reminded me of no one so much as my old pediatrician and family friend, Sam Prince. The two didn't resemble each other physically, nor was there anything particular in manner. I suppose he was just very familiar to me: Jewish, north Jersey; both of us provincials out of a very particular psychosocial milieu; ten miles and twenty-three years apart, growing up in the same light, the same benzene fumes. The same oil refinery fire-eaters flaming the night along the Jersey Turnpike. The same speech patterns, body language, and the rest. I was immediately comfortable around him. I could read him easily."
Lunching with Ginsberg
Willard Spiegelman:
"Rich’s formidable presence on our national literary and larger cultural/public scene reflected and, in turn, produced changes in the zeitgeist. She not only was affected by every major political crusade of the past half century – the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, gay liberation – but she also became, as few poets ever do, the living embodiment of the causes she fiercely fought for. Her poetry, like her prose, is the living testimony to her life." Poetry in Review: Collected Poems of Adrienne Rich
Leah Falk:
"In this universe of truncated memory and painful history, the speaker who wishes to remember is asked to begin again as if without antecedent, and yet with awareness of the enormity of what precedes her. It's into this fragile territory, where absence and silence are tangible fabrics, that Sharkey welcomes us." Ink Stain on My Fingers
Megan Marshall:
"John Ashbery was late. The man who'd won, all in a season four years earlier, the three major prizes—National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize—that it had taken Elizabeth Bishop, the poet whose work and life the day's crowd had gathered to honor and mourn, a lifetime of fitful yet painstaking effort to garner, was late and holding up the proceedings." October 21, 1979: Agassiz House, Radcliffe Yard
Chard deNiord:
"I understand my fellow poets’ reluctance to talk about poetry’s status in the market place. I, too, am befuddled and discouraged by the imbalance between poetry’s runaway production and its actual readership. If poetry were a river in America, it would be a drowned river, that is, a river that’s overflowed its banks." Swimming in the Drowned River of Contemporary American Poetry
Trevor Barnett:
"I have walked down the road on which Lorca was murdered more times than I care to remember. It takes only an hour—what an hour! —to travel from the outskirts of one whitewash-and-myrtle Andalusian village to another, from Viznar to Alfacar, and to take in some of the finest views of the mustardy-gold plains and the foothills to the north-east of Granada lined with pines. Following the eleventh-century irrigation channel—aqueduct, ditch, tunnel; water and shade, shade and water—the road, serpentine and clean of bloodstains made by the sun or the moon, takes a rest at each bend as the traveller listens to the gathering silences of the sierra. Above, the cross that marks the highest peak—and halfway down the road they took him, one on each arm." Looking for Lorca
Jefferson Holdridge and Brian Ó Conchubhair:
"The title of this collection of essays, Post-Ireland?, acknowledges the question of the disappearance of a certain version of Ireland, that the old definitions may no longer apply, and implies with the question mark that perhaps Ireland can never be left behind because, as a colonial entity, the formulation of its identity has always been linked to its possible dissolution or absorption. Once, the larger threat was England, the United Kingdom, then America, now it is the European Union or globalization." Introduction to Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry
John Gallas:
"One hundred and seventy-five years ago, John Clare, residing at Matthew Allen's High Beach Private Asylum in Epping Forest, decided to go home. 'Felt very melancholy', he wrote, two days before. 'Fell in with some gypsies, one of whom offered to assist in my escape from the madhouse'. Two days later, he was off.
"His route, via the Great North Road, was around eighty miles. I thought this doable. First I Googled walking directions from each place he had remembered to the next. Then I bought a pair of Skechers, with Memory Foam feet. I took a spare T-shirt, a spare pair of socks, a rollable raincoat, a hat, the Penguin Clare, a notebook and pen, and my iPod Fitness app, to measure each damned step along the way. John C had old boots, and nothing else. I also had a bank account."
Mad John's Walk
Robert Archambeau:
"At a Donaghy reading there was never any of the mumbling, page-flipping, or nervous self-explanation with which poetry audiences are all too familiar. He was entirely present to the poem and to the audience, not hovering a little above himself, wondering just how he ought to manifest. Once, when Yeats's famous question 'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' came up, Donaghy gave an answer that underlined his commitment to losing himself in performance: 'Who cares?' Better for the two to be so intermingled they can't be torn asunder." His Swords and Armor: Remembering Michael Donaghy
Gerard Smyth:
"His voice – with its idiosyncratic tone and verbal texture – registered firmly as one of the most distinctive and it is now one of the most authoritative among poets of his generation. The weight of that authority and his mastery of a personal tone are evident in this fine new collection. There is, too, a rare integrity that keeps a balance between the lived life and imagination. McCarthy, the poet and thinker, is a defender of the past against the more crass aspects of modernity." When All Our Gold Was Gorse
Katie Peterson:
"I write this at a time when many individuals with many different kinds of lives aspire to be poets, and many different kinds of poetry are said to thrive in these United States. Is it too easy to say that Lowell's star has fallen a bit? Or is it actually that the sense of achievement his work self-consciously carries with it itself carries less credibility than it used to?" Introduction to New Selected Poems by Robert Lowell
Vidyan Ravinthiran:
"Nothing is natural in the work of Rae Armantrout. Our words, gestures, and relationships are conventional, scripted, deformed — or outright produced — by, as she has it, 'the interventions of capitalism into consciousness.' On the subject of 'nature,' I notice plenty of leaves, and leaf-shadows, and leaf-reflections (in both senses of the word) in her poems — but her plants are urban, compromised, possibly parodying of Keats..." The Lonely Dream
David Baker:
"What does anyone—any one of us—represent? Whom do we represent? In 'The Poet' Emerson fuses democratic idealism and aesthetic power when he asserts that the poet is representative: 'He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth'... I want to press on the issue of representation anew as I look at two new books of poems by emerging male poets who seem, at first, to represent far-distant points on the continuum of cultural engagement and personal revelation. What does it mean to represent?" Representative Men
Magdalena Kay:
"'Is there a life before death?' If we can pry it loose from its political context, the question echoes throughout Heaney’s oeuvre. How much of life are we given before death takes it away? Can we call it life if it is constantly shadowed by the fear of death, or the deaths of loved ones? Can we separate the realms of death and life so neatly?" Descent into Darkness
John Matthias:
"I've been reading William Hazlitt after many years and thinking about 'first meetings with poets,' Hazlitt's essay by that title, and some first meetings of my own, along with the question of apprenticeship. Luckily enough, the first poet I met wasn't Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And luckily enough, it wasn't 1798. When Coleridge visited the Hazlitt family home in Shropshire, he began to talk and, says Hazlitt in his famous account, 'did not cease while he staid; nor has he since, that I know of.' For me, John Berryman was a little like that, but Berryman, again luckily enough, wasn't the first poet I met. The first poet I met was Milton Kessler." An Apprenticeship
Vona Groarke:
"Do you too dislike it? Not the idea of it. Not the best of it. Not the impulse. But let's face it, most of what calls itself poetry is god-awful. Writing a good poem is hard and it's hardly ever accomplished. It's important to dislike the mediocre, self-important, cheaply-made, insincere or spineless poem, because only then can there be imaginative allowance for the extraordinary one."The Rising Generation Questionnaire
Peter Everwine:
"Perhaps to live in the present—the bell, the heron—is enough. What the cell teaches me isn't the peace found in solitude, isn't the detachment one requires. What I find is what lies beneath the Word: silence. I bring to it my life, my memories, my history, and I don't wish to give them up, or can't give them up without becoming something other than who I am." In the Moment:
An Interview with Peter Everwine, by Christopher Buckley and Jon Veinberg [Start 2017]
