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
William Logan:
From The New Criterion, the latest edition of William Logan's Verse Chronicle, reviewing recent books by Les Murray, Robert Pinsky, Sandra McPherson, Charles Wright, Kathleen Jamie, and Robert Hass: The World Is Too Much with Us
Gianluigi Simonetti:
"The frequency of 'weak' tones across the spectrum of recent Italian poetry goes beyond individual preference or literary fashion; it can be seen as a symptom of a condition that affects all writers of verse, even those who continue to value clearly delineated subjects and more complex styles. Aesthetic judgments aside, a basic question arises: why continue to bet on poetry in the very moment when its flagging status and its difficulty in possessing reality are most glaringly obvious? If what was once the authoritative and defining perspective of the lyric 'I' now shows signs of aphasia, if the formal choices of even the best poets tell us that the guarantees of knowledge offered by the genre have diminished, then, as Walter Siti puts it, 'the question that genuinely arises is: why break the line?'" Italian Poetry Today: New Ways to Break the Line, translated by Geoffrey Brock
Marilyn Hacker:
"I wish I could remember when I first read "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law." It could have been in 1963, when the eponymous book appeared, but if it had, it would have been a revelation (which I did not have for some years) that other women poets were grappling with the issues I was at twenty, that there might be dialogue and exchange, if not in conversations and letters, in the way a poem in a book calls another poet back to notebook and pen." The Young Insurgent's Commonplace Book," from Adrienne Rich: A Symposium
Daniel Hoffman:
"Elizabeth McFarland was such a modest, private person, she would have been astonished had she known she'd be featured in The New York Times Magazine on Christmas Sunday as one of the most notable persons who died in 2005. She is the only editor in the history of publishing in America who brought into six million households new work of the most eminent poets—W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Richard Eberhart, Mark Van Doren, John Ciardi, Theodore Roethke, Walter De la Mare—and the then most promising younger ones, among them Maxine Kumin, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, William Jay Smith, William Stafford, and John Updike. This is a service to literary culture not likely to be repeated." Preface to Over the Summer Water: Poems by Elizabeth McFarland
Kazim Ali:
"... how could I be a poet, how could I pray at all, when there was something I wasn't telling anyone, even God? Isn't absolute silence, the thing that won't answer, the one thing you can trust, that you can tell anything to? But I couldn't even do that much. Ultimately it was my unwillingness to speak about the one thing perhaps most important in the mortal and carnate universe—my body's desire—that torqued my language into poetry. I never knew how to say anything directly and so I had to hedge in a hundred different ways." Faith and Silence
John Barnie:
"Conrad was a poet because, despite the surface markers of the genre of the novel, the novella and the short story that characterise his work, his sensibility, the way in which he engaged with the world, are more closely associated with poetry than fiction. There is evidence that Conrad himself thought of his writing in these terms. In Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance (1924) Ford Madox Ford claims that when he first met Conrad, 'We agreed that a poem was not that which was written in verse but that, either prose or verse, that had constructive beauty.' Conrad himself read very little English verse, but at one point, according to Ford, he became interested in blank verse, and when Ford pointed out to him that whole passages of Heart of Darkness 'were not very far off blank verse', Conrad 'tried for a short time to turn a paragraph into decasyllabic lines'. The poetry is there before our eyes, but the conventions of genre blind us to its presence." Chewing the Cwd: Tales from the Creative Writing Departments
Stanley Plumly:
"To paraphrase Yeats: Even sons and daughters of the swan must share something of every paddler's heritage. So e-mail—or some future further telepathy—is certainly here to stay. Has it, though, come to replace the true letters of true writers, not to mention the now old-fashioned exchanges of the old-fashioned, amateurs who simply like to write personally, having taken time to think through what they want to say, word by made word? Doubtless, e-mail has replaced the impulse of letter-writing, if not yet the directness of the telephone. E-mail, therefore, like the remote, is with us, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it until it rudely replaces snail-mail. It is its tendency that is scary, its substitutive convenience, the way the even more reductive, Tonto-talking picture prose of text-messaging replaces e-mail itself, and the way iPod pictures of our faces moving our lips may replace words themselves. Lip-reading prose." Something of the Sort: Full-bodied, paper-original, non-expedient correspondence
Richard Tillinghast:
"Thus it was in a taverna along the quay in Piraeus that I got my first exposure to Cavafy's poetry—Cavafy the Alexandrian, the Constantinopolitan, the patron saint of poets who love the demotic civilization of the eastern Mediterranean. Setting my backpack down in a corner, I walked through to the kitchen as one does both in Greece and in Turkey, and pointed to one or two dishes that were simmering in copper pots on the stove. Achilles, Menelaos, Mark Antony, early Christians and late Pagans, the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor John Kantakuzinos—the sprawl of Mediterranean history from the Trojan War to the poet's own afternoons in the tavernas of fin de siècle Alexandria—filled the little room as I ate lamb and eggplant, sopping up the juices with thick chunks of bread, chasing it down with retsina. All that human drama was contemporary in Cavafy's eyes (heavy-lidded with ennui, one imagines). Or more precisely, it was contemporaneous, encompassed by the same long continuous moment in time." Istanbul in Winter
Edward Hirsch:
"The nightingale has always had tremendous metaphorical and symbolic power. It seems to fill a need—apparently irresistible—to attribute human feeling to the bird's pure and persistent song. Poets, who are often nocturnal creatures, have especially identified with 'spring's messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale,' as Sappho calls it." To a Nightingale
Geoffrey G. O'Brien:
"The roots of poetry are buried in proto-shamanism, which I suspect is of Upper Paleolithic antiquity. The shaman, as a novice, must rid himself of his given body, for a new and magical body, which is capable of mental travel. The main difference here between shamans, say, in 19th century Siberia, and poets in America today, is that shamans were central to their communities, they belonged in a way no American writer, even those with huge audiences, belong today. Whatever one must do to make the move from the given life to a creative one — well, that is up to each of us. The poetry scene today is flooded with young, talented, unoriginal writers who are trying to write significant poetry based on their given lives…" Capital Truths, reviewing Giles Goodland's Capital.
Clayton Eshleman:
"The roots of poetry are buried in proto-shamanism, which I suspect is of Upper Paleolithic antiquity. The shaman, as a novice, must rid himself of his given body, for a new and magical body, which is capable of mental travel. The main difference here between shamans, say, in 19th century Siberia, and poets in America today, is that shamans were central to their communities, they belonged in a way no American writer, even those with huge audiences, belong today. Whatever one must do to make the move from the given life to a creative one — well, that is up to each of us. The poetry scene today is flooded with young, talented, unoriginal writers who are trying to write significant poetry based on their given lives…" An Interview with Clayton Eshleman
Christian Wiman:
"... what happens to a passion that, though it fuels art, remains in some essential human sense abstract, never altogether attaching itself to any one person, any one time or token of the perishable earth? Does art, at least in some instances, and for some artists, demand this, that they always feel most intensely the life they've failed to feel? Is it worth it?" Milton in Guatemala
Wendell Berry:
"... theorizing about the origin of poetry seems to me a little bit futile. I don’t think Wordsworth knew very much about it. I don’t think I know very much about it. In the first place, when you’re at work on these things, when you’re really at work, you’re not paying attention to how it’s happening; you’re just making it happen. It would be like a quarterback stopping in the middle of a play and explaining to himself what he’s about to do. That’s not the way it’s done. Something you’re not conscious of is happening. It happens to poets, it happens to athletes, it happens to horsemen, it happens to good workmen of all kinds." Singing to Keep the Mind Awake, an interview with Wendell Berry
Major Jackson:
"... in a country whose professed strength is best observed in its plurality of cultures, what seems odd to me (and this I find most appalling about contemporary American poetry) is the dearth of poems written by white poets that address racial issues, that chronicle our struggle as a democracy to find tranquility and harmony as a nation containing many nations. Why is this?" A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black
Kay Ryan:
"Reading Frost's private notebooks is the opposite of pulling back the curtain on Oz. While the real Oz turns out to be a little man working a big speaker system, the real Frost turns out to be someone naturally—preternaturally—amplified even when nobody else is listening." I Demand to Speak with God
Donald Revell:
"It is the intimacy of poetry that makes our art such a beautiful recourse from the disgrace and manipulations of public speech, of empty rhetoric. A poem that begins to see and then continues seeing is not deceived, nor is it deceptive. It never strays, neither into habit nor abstraction." The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye
John Hollander:
"Despite her reputation as a dog trainer with unpredictable views, her somewhat iconoclastic speculations in prose, and her store of knowledge of past and present modes of human dealings with domestic animals, [Vicki] Hearne's poetry can give no comfort to the sentimentalizers of the relation between the human Self and the animal Other, nor to sensationalists of expressiveness. The poems give no comfort to Humane Societies, nor, indeed, to other literalists, for her vast respect for the power and dignity of representation itself causes Hearne to release her animal subjects and their human agents out onto fields of metaphor far richer and more varied in their vegetation and contours than the narrow places of mere emblem." Introduction to Tricks of the Light: New and Selected Poems, by Vicki Hearne.
Karen Volkman:
"In the numerous translations of all or part of this voluminous work, approaches are... diverse. Some privilege formal structures, others emphasize Baudelaire's voice and persona—splenetic, riven, ravished, appalled. Keith Waldrop's new translation, rendering highly formal verse structures into cadenced prose, seems at first a provocation of Baudelairean proportion... What Waldrop does offer, in effect, is a book-length argument, on Baudelaire in particular but also on the nature of translation, or on what we might call propositional translation—that is, one that distances itself from the idea of line-by-line rendering as the translator's primary task and repositions itself as an argument regarding the poet's larger project and aesthetic contexts." Light and Twilight, on Keith Waldrop's translation of Les Fleurs du Mal.
Atar Hadari:
"In my twenties, a few years after taking all the poetry workshops I was ever going to take, I began to read biographies of poets. These were no random poets either—and not necessarily figures I admired—but rather people who had made a career in a particular way—William Carlos Williams, for instance, earning his living as a doctor, as well as Dylan Thomas,who did it by writing for radio and touring the poetry circuit. What I was looking for was guidance as to how the poetic enterprise ticks on once you are no longer bubbling along with a crowd of also-striving mini-bards. I was looking for a view of how people do this thing, really. I was looking for the shape of a poet's life." Why the Dead Have Lives
Marilyn Hacker:
"... the profound revelations of Alice Quinn's edition of [Elizabeth] Bishop's uncollected poems are not of the identities of lovers, friends, editors or mentors, or the recounting of actual incidents referred to in a given poem... they are, rather, about the formal decisions and trains of thought (un train peut cacher un autre) which went into the ongoing, often long-ongoing, composition of Bishop's poetry." A Doubled Good Read
Mark Levine:
"It troubles me a bit that, as poets, we seem to be required to pretend that everything we put in poems emerges from a very supportable rationale." An Interview with Mark Levine
Naeem Murr:
"Loving my Poet as I do, though, I try hard to understand what a poet is. The first clue lies in the fact that my Poet—every poet—is an insomniac." My Poet
C. K. Williams:
"'You must know everything,' Isaac Babel's mother said to him, the most apt advice I know for an aspiring writer: ideally the poet would strive for the curiosity of the ethnographer, the precision of the philosopher, the moral flexibility of the social theorist, the scrupulousness of the scientist, plus... Plus what, is the hard question. What are the qualities of the mind of the poet which might enable all those virtuous identities, yet prepare the poet for the very particular and very peculiar act of poetic composition; how does the poet's mind operate in the creation of poems?" A Letter to a Workshop
Bob Hicok:
"I don’t know how anyone could write with a group of people in mind. It’s difficult enough to rummage around in my own head, let alone estimate how my words will enter another life. Writers should be good at sensing where readers will be more or less confused, angry, emotionally or intellectually involved, in evaluating the content of their writing in general terms. But to think about readers while writing is to invite the hypothetical into the process in a way that stops me from being open to the actual, to myself." Is a Pepper Steak a Steak Made of Pepper?:
An Interview with Bob Hicok
William Logan:
From The New Criterion, the latest edition of William Logan's Verse Chronicle, reviewing recent books by John Ashbery, Frieda Hughes, Cathy Park Hong, Frederick Seidel, Robert Lowell, and Henri Cole: "Let's do it, let's fall in luff"
Tony Hoagland:
"Poetry, entertainment and truth—they form an old romantic triangle, a menage a trois, intimate with and jealous of each other. Each is related to the others, but distinct. When anyone of them incorporates the other, the result approaches the third." Barbarians Inside the Gate: Poetry, Truth, and Entertainment
Marion K. Stocking:
"In 1950, when the Beloit Poetry Journal was new, critics divided the poetry turf between the wild men and the academics—the 'raw and the cooked.' Our 1957 chapbook contrasted the formally conservative British 'Movement' poets like Amis and Larkin with our West Coast 'Underground' like Orlovitz and Bukowski. Today the 'schools' are somewhat different. David Lehman, writing of the New York School, contrasts their avant-garde 'linguistic engines' with the 'repositories of felt experience' of other poets. I'd like here to explore that distinction." Books in Brief: Where Are We Now?
Baron Wormser:
"In its Back-to-the-Land way, the household we founded was an attempt to live a poem." Excerpts from The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid
Richard Tillinghast:
"One thing W B Yeats, Louis MacNiece, Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney—to pick four poets from the generations preceding the current one—had in common was their preoccupation with their native country both as a nation and as a place... When we come to the poets included in the Wake Forest anthology, that old sense of Ireland seems to have gone up in smoke. It would seem that now, as a prosperous member of the European Union, host to waves of emigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, Ireland is just like everywhere else." The Future of Irish Poetry?
David Hamilton:
"One night almost a year ago, two days home from having read in the International Herald Tribune of Donald Hall's appointment as Poet Laureate, my wife asked about Hall's work, what was special about it?" On White Apples and the Taste of Stone.
John Hartley Williams:
"There is a contest between language and subject matter in poetry that has not been resolved, and very likely won't be soon." Communicative?, reviewing collections by Peter Redgrove, Penelope Shuttle, Andrew McNeillie, and Tim Liardet.
Ron Padgett:
"It is a happy coincidence that the first line of poetry in this book is an exclamation and the last poem begins with the idea of excitement, for throughout his life Kenneth Koch was highly energized by the mystery and pleasure of being alive and by writing poetry that became a part of that mystery and pleasure." Introduction to Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems
Anne Stevenson:
"Why did my father—an analytical philosopher who dismissed Yeats's dabblings in mysticism as 'completely crazy'—find these lines so irresistible?... Because, I suspect, poetry written for the ear speaks to the ear before it appeals to the mind or asks for an interpretation." The Unified Dance
David Wojahn:
"[Natasha Trethewey, Major Jackson, David Rivard, and Rodney Jones] are not by any means [Robert] Lowell’s descendants, but they share with him a desire to superimpose the historical upon the personal; and for them the river of history is even more turbid than it was for the aristocratic Lowell, involving above all matters of race and of class..."
"History Shaping Selves: Four Poets"
David Kirby:
"...before the Dante of The Divine Comedy walked through the Inferno on his way to Purgatory and Paradise, the real-life Dante Alighieri navigated some byways that might have made Hell's highways look positively inviting by comparison."
"The Goat Paths of Italy: Dante’s Search for Beatrice"
David Caplan:
"Writing around 400 A.D., St. Augustine asserted a classically stern conception of form. 'The very art by which I composed poems,' he maintained, 'did not have different laws in different places but was always the same.' From its start poetry in English has lacked this certainty..."
"Introduction to Theories of Form"
Reginald Shepherd:
"While our best poets enact and embody emotions and ideas in their work, they also question and even erase the dichotomy between the emotional and the intellectual. Such poets have passion – their poems are not cold, though in some the fires may be banked, thus burning more intensely – yet their hearts are not on their sleeves but in their words."
"One State of the Art"
Ann Townsend:
"Erotic poetry makes its own strategic use of the emotional tactics that lovers have always employed on each other. Poetry enacts a simultaneously frustrating and engaging dance of intimacy: hurry and delay; contact and distance; love and hate; pleasure and pain. Poetry connects readers to the made and shaped lives of strangers."
"Meretricious Kisses"
Dave Smith:
"Real poems resist the smug, easy, glib, and superficial. The good poem destabilizes, unbalances, stirs up, digs down, demands feeling in exact circumstances. It refuses mass idea, mass truth, mass reality as false to its only client, the individual. No poem succeeds without threat, implied or explicit. Threat manifests what is important to know. Threat engineers the struggle of self to come into being."
"St. Cyril's Dragon: The Threat of Poetry"
Albert Goldbarth:
"Occasionally some piece of writing seems to embody a future sensibility, as if a time traveler had journeyed into history and inadvertently left a poem or a novel on those wayback shores."
On Leigh Hunt's "The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit"
John Koethe:
"... the sound I hear is an understated, almost deflationary one. I think that certain kinds of abstract, nonfigurative words feel quite wonderful in the mind's mouth, so to speak."
"Habits of Thought, Inhabitings of Possibility: An Interview with John Koethe"
Two Reviews from Verse:
"... the adequation of 'the individual Mind... to the external World' and the more extraordinary corollary, 'The external World is fitted to the Mind' is Sobin's great subject, or rather his great gamble."
— Joshua Corey on Gustaf Sobin's The Places as Preludes
"She knows that attending to those on the margins – the oppressed, the exploited, the poor, the neglected – makes her 'culturally incorrect,' but facing a culture whose tradition has allowed cruelty and injustice such momentum, she longs to interrupt."
— Chris McDermott on Alice Fulton's Cascade Experiment
Scott Donaldson:
"The combative James Dickey, taking [E.A.]Robinson's cause as his own, observed in 1969 that Robinson's 'considered, unhurried lines, as uncomplicated in syntax as they are difficult in thought,' represented 'a constant rebuke to those who conceive[d] of poetry as verbal legerdemain or,' as Eliot called it, 'as the '"superior amusement."' But we do not need to knock down other great poets to make room for E.A.R. All we have to do is read him."
"Recovering Robinson"
Peter Robinson:
"Perhaps I'm not the only reader who, on receiving a new issue of Poetry Ireland Review, turns immediately to Dennis O'Driscoll's 'Pickings and Choosings' to see what poetry's great and good (and the others too) have had to say for themselves in recent months. Doubtless I'd be a better person if the new poetry were my first resort; but reading poetry requires an investment of energy and understanding that isn't always on tap at the end of a tricky working day..."
"Here Comes (Almost) Everybody," on Dennis O'Driscoll's The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations
Claudia Rankine:
"Form has everything to do with content. We know this from Olson. I love the potential openness of the page - there is so much unspoken 'underneath-ness' in language. I try to use the page to illustrate the mind's meanderings - to suggest silence, for example, and to represent all the ways the subject is approached in my own mind. The more I can open up the page to accommodate my own explorations, the more integrity the poem has for me."
"Interview with Claudia Rankine"
Claudia Emerson:
"Instead of 'accessibility,' we might also aspire for 'clarity' and then strive for, instead of 'difficulty,' 'complexity.' If we care about readers at all (and not just those in the academy), we have to give them a way into the poem. And I think we need to remember that clarity does not preclude depth. If our language is precise, our imagery clear, our metaphors original and well crafted, then we can indeed create poems that will reward a listener on being heard for the first time and also repay the astute close reader."
"An Interview with Claudia Emerson"
Christian Wiman:
"With all the clamor in this country about the audience for poetry, a veritable barnyard of noise into which I myself have been known to bray, we shouldn't lose sight of one of poetry's chief strengths: how little of it there is."
"In Praise of Rareness"
Marilyn Hacker:
"Here are important books by three major Northern Ireland poets, poets who span that generation which will, I think, be remembered as marking an unprecedented flowering and fruition of poetry in Ireland."
"Belfast Triptych"
Joshua Weiner:
"If Koch is a wonderful poet, even a masterful one, the question remains, is he an important poet? Does he have a role as an artist in the development of American poetry; or is he more the elaborately talented poetry-writing friend who became an academic, a supporting character in an historical play about some other poets of significance, titled New York School?"
Review: The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch
Robin Becker:
"Political concerns have always suffused Kumin's work. ... During the last three years, she yoked her considerable prosodic skill to an investigative journalist bent, creating a series of new poems that astonish. Her subject is torture."
Activist and Gardener: On Maxine Kumin's Torture Poems
D.H. Tracy:
"We let some poets get away with being shits – do we let others get away with being wrong?"
Bad Ideas
Franz Wright:
"I remember very early having the sense that there is one poet in the world, and sometimes if you're very lucky and you work very hard, you get to be the poet for a while. The rest of the time, you're trying to earn your way back to being the poet for a moment. Meanwhile, you love poetry itself."
A Conversation with Franz Wright
Robin Becker:
"If conscious human labor asserts a counter-force in the fallen world, this musical translation represents such a force."
Timely Engagements: Summer and Sustainability in The Georgics of Virgil
Mary Jo Salter:
"Although I do think in terms of meter and rhyme and all of those aural devices, I would be pleased to hear a reader say that I, the reader, was not conscious of what you, the poet, were doing; it only occurred to me later that this was a sonnet... As the poet, I want it to feel almost natural, and yet, of course, if I felt that entirely, I would just be talking. I want a sense of the shape of it to be apparent only later."
Order & Disorder: An Interview with Mary Jo Salter
