Rory Waterman:
"'The more criticism I write, the more I’m asked to write about criticism; and, the more I’m asked to write about criticism, the less I want to write about anything at all.' Thus begins Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue, William Logan’s fifth tome of critical prose in twelve years. He goes on: ‘then something gets under my skin’, and this, for the fifth time, is a book about literature getting under the skin of one of the wittiest and most astute poet-critics of our—or any—generation." Raising the Bar and Then Electrifying It: The Savage Criticism of William Logan
Alissa Valles:
"[Harry Clifton's] poetry has little of the exhilarating zaniness and wildness of Muldoon’s, and in terms of poetic form it bears few of the marks associated with postmodern poetry. The poems’ daring lies almost entirely in their philosophical direction, in their approach to the problem of living in a postmodern age, in their stubborn refusal to fudge their answers. Secular Eden sets sail for elusive destinations, conscious of its own gravity, more ship than plane, more submarine than ship. When it detonates its charges, it is often as if under water, swelling gradual waves." Before History
Mark Doty:
"'The Fish' continues a tradition of seeking, in the vast book of difference the American continent offers, opportunities to be educated. The poem interprets a wordless, creaturely presence—like Whitman's 'noiseless patient spider' or Emily Dickinson's 'narrow fellow in the grass'—and provides, in its way, speech for that which is wordless. 'Every object rightly seen,' wrote Emerson, 'unlocks a new faculty of the soul.' The poet turns to the natural world, pays close attention, and is rewarded with instruction." A Tremendous Fish
Marilyn Krysl:
"In an interview with Annie Finch, Marilyn Hacker quotes the first line of a sonnet by the Jamaican writer Claude McKay: 'If we must die, let it not be like hogs.' Hacker explains that this line, copied out in pencil, had turned up in the pocket of one of the inmates during the famous rebellion at New York state's Attica prison in 1971. Hacker invokes the prisoner and McKay as examples of the kinds of isolated and disenfranchised people who have seized on poetry in fixed forms to speak about their suffering. For those who are not acquainted with Hacker's work, I offer this incident as a thumbnail portrait of a woman who wrote her first sonnet at age twelve and entered New York University at age fifteen. She is erudite, in the best sense of that word, and politically engaged." The Poet in Wartime
R. T. Smith:
"For many, Flannery O'Connor is also something of a mystery, often considered a Dixie Dickinson, a savant whose saucy wit and intricacies of thought spilled inexplicably from a homebound invalid with a morbid sense of justice. It's an appealing view for some, fulfilling many of our obsolete notions about "sheltered" women writers, but it just ain't so." The Little Georgia Magnet
Durs Grünbein:
"Any explanations poets may give about what they do primarily serve the preservation of a secret. Vague as this secret may be, all poets, in their own individual ways, will hold on to it and barricade themselves behind it." The Poem and Its Secret
Stephen Yenser:
"When Heather McHugh entitles her splendid new volume of poems Upgraded to Serious, she hints at her particular extravagances, which issue from an obsession on the one hand with the irreducible lubricity of language and on the other hand with the inexorable paradoxes of existence—not that these are really two hands, I suppose, as much as the one hand we must clap with, ever since (as Kenner notes in the text just mentioned) the American linguist Benjamin Whorf demanded that we dwell on the special predicament we are in, where language shapes and reshapes the things we see, discover, and discuss." Poetry in Review
Matthea Harvey:
"I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it. Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language. I don’t think all poems need to be written in conversational language—those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery." An Interview with Matthea Harvey
Jennifer Moxley:
"The poet's psychology, visible only to the poet's friends, floats lightly over the surface of the poem. It discolors some words temporarily, but never quite settles into them—provided those words belong together. If so, they will eventually cast off this shadow; if not, it will eventually smother them. Thus, it is the poem, not the poet, that we love. Through it the singular becomes shared, the transitory eternal." Fragments of a Broken Poetics
Kevin Prufer:
"We have never been particularly good at talking about death; when we address it at all, we are often best coming at it slantwise, through allegory, simile, and most of all, a bitter sort of comedy." "Light, Light: Do Not Go": On D. A. Powell's Chronic and Others
William Logan:
We continue our series of prose features with "Trampling Out the Vintage," the latest installment of William Logan's Verse Chronicle, reviewing books by C. K. Williams, Tony Hoagland, Keith Douglas, Don Paterson, Derek Walcott, and Anne Carson, from the June issue of The New Criterion. Trampling Out the Vintage
James P. Lenfestey:
"I remember the thrill of reading another kind of poetry, looser yet much more wildly imaginative, from poets around the world and not just the East Coast or San Francisco, plus American poems unafraid of the familiar fragrance of corn stubble and ditch grass, plus delightfully cranky literary and political essays often signed by a columnist named Crunk." Robert Bly, William Duffy, James Wright and The Fifties
Michael Scharf:
"... while most people agree on what it means to use English in daily discourse, more controversial is the role of English in Indian literature. Indian critics overtly evaluate a writer's regional linguistic loyalties and correlate those loyalties to the writer's degree of "Indianness." In that equation, as [the anthropologist Rashmi] Sadana has documented, writers of English come in for lashing critique by bhasha, or vernacular, writers... Nowhere is this more true than in Indian poetry in English." The Other Mother Tongue
Norman Austin:
"Nostalgia! Now there's a theme that calls for high poetry. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton—remove nostalgia from their palette and what would we have? Some noble sentences no doubt, but dry as a biscuit when what we crave is cake, Proust's madeleine, dipped in Madame's tisane, which crumbles in our mouth and from the crumbs our whole village rises up before our eyes, house by house, street by street, dog by dog, and oh yes, there's Her Serene Highness, Mrs. Kandinsky's soporific calico presiding over the scene from her parlor window." Homeric Nostalgia
Paul Muldoon:
"It's no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas's 'Do not go gentle into that good night' is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there's a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas's poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting." Dylan and Delayment: Introduction to The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
David Young:
"I don't know if there is really any such thing as the poetry of old age. Probably not. Some poets are lucky, like Stevens and Yeats, to continue being productive in their late years and even sometimes to improve on early or middle work. Others, like Wordsworth, just drone on, and we learn to ignore their late poems. That there is something unique or distinctive about a poem produced by a 75- or 80-year-old is one of those assertions that most likely won't bear close inspection." Two Old Guys
Pierre-Albert Jourdan:
"Between this harmonious landscape of the Haut Comtat Venaissin and us, an over-motorized cohort of heads stuffed with endless schemes, I have the impression that a sort of landslide is taking place; or a crack in the earth widening so much that it becomes more and more difficult for us to cross and meet up with ourselves. Detect how an understanding between the two parties could benefit mutual equilibrium. Perhaps one should ask: how to listen? This would already be a major step forward." The Approach (translated and introduced by John Taylor)
Kevin Stein:
"It's patently ludicrous to believe any poet laureate, whether state or national, can resuscitate American poetry. I know a bit of what I speak. I've been a state laureate for more than five years. The job is Sisyphean, shouldering the boulder of poetry up the steep peak of public disinterest. Yes, there are successes, momentary and deceptive, in which one entices a skeptical audience to believe poetry's word and song matter in their lives. But these are isolated instants bracketed by classroom bell or nursing home meds. Then for them it's off to phys ed or physical therapy, and routine again thickens their blood with the mundane. Rather than inciting me to slit my poetic wrists, the transitory nature of what I call 'the verse effect' is actually freeing. Like the poem itself, I say what I can say and then fall silent. It is all I can do." (Hidden Track): Poetry in Public Places
C. K. Williams:
"The new way of composing must have come all at once; I imagine it must have felt like some kind of conversion experience. There are very few signs before the 1855 edition that this great thing was about to occur. It's as though his actual physical brain went through some incredible mutation, as though—a little science-fiction, why not?—aliens had transported him up to their spaceship, and put him down again with a new mind, a new poetry apparatus. It is really that crazy... And, most importantly, we don't know where his music came from..." Whitman's Music
W. N. Herbert:
"Poetry can seem, as a medium, to resist simplicity. Pattern loves its intricacies, and verbal patterning in particular has a tendency to intoxicate the unwary composer before and sometimes instead of its audience. Part of mastery, then, must always concern restraint: when to attempt simplicity—with the attendant risk of being thought simple—and, just as crucially, when not to." Approaching Simplicity (reviewing books by Billy Collins, Vona Groarke, and Don Paterson)
Coleman Barks:
"... I'm sure there's a place beyond mind and heart and soul. This is radical theology we're into now, that has no name, that, when you get there, the language you say is just like saying lines of poetry, like saying lines that somebody else has written. But that part can't speak. It can listen, I think, and maybe that's why music is important to it, because then music responds to it; it responds to music. That, I don't know what to call it, heartsoul? Something else, or deep being. It's only experiential; it cannot be talked about." A Conversation with Coleman Barks
David Yezzi:
"If Yeats is correct that the imagination of personality, the social muse (Eliot’s “varied types of society”), participates at least in part in the greatest works, then most contemporary poetry must be sorely wanting. The bulk of poetry written at any particular time tends to lack sufficient red corpuscles, but never is poetic anemia so apparent as when the element of drama has been removed." The Dramatic Element
Les Murray:
"A lot of modern art is very autistic. There is this arbitrary law that you're not supposed to be sentimental or have any feelings. What the bloody hell is that but autism, pretending to be some kind of automaton? I came across a wonderful phrase recently. Some fellow writing against the Conservative Party of Canada, parodying their attitudes, described the conservative image of Harvard as 'the great ice-palace of the modern elite'—where it's all intellect and no feelings allowed." A Conversation with Les Murray
Pattiann Rogers:
"What in the world is the point? Not that poets can answer that question—or theologians, or scientists—but all of us together at least can manifest the fact that we asked. I went through college during a time when it was assumed that the function of literature was to question, "What is the good life?"—good in all ways. To ask that question and approach it from many directions and perspectives—that's the source of the obligation that I feel in the overall effort of my work." A Conversation with Pattiann Rogers
Lawrence Raab, John Burnside, Dan O'Brien, and Regan Good:
Four poets reply to the same four questions in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review. Nathaniel Perry, the editor of the Review, describes this, the first of the "4 x 4" series: "For this inaugural edition, we have two poets who have published numerous books and two who have yet to publish a full-length volume. One of our respondents lives in rural Scotland, another in New York City. Two are university and college professors, another a playwright. Our intention, then, is to make a space for as many different sorts of answers as possible. In this new way, we hope the conversation will grow and continue." 4x4: Questions and Responses
Robin Davidson:
"Lipska’s rejection of nationalism is consistent with her vision of the artist's role in society. She would argue that the poet does not craft a work out of sheer will or calculation; rather, art depends on an innocence rooted in a fidelity to personal experience, an authentic response to one's life that is lost in politics, or any other highly organized, artificial social system. The solidarity of poets, unlike that of political regimes, or of activists organized against them, is not a matter of design. Poetry is not collective life. It arises from solitude; it cannot be planned. Lipska thinks of art not only as a rejection of political intention but also as a deliberate engagement with the irrational and with uselessness." Introduction to The New Century
Mario Relich:
"Adam Kirsch is a poet, but this collection... shows him to be, like Winters himself, a formidable and boldly authoritative critic. I say 'boldly authoritative' because this is an age of extreme relativism, dominated by the assumption that the primary purpose of the critic is to entertain, with the ancillary aim of providing consumer information, rather than to judge and evaluate. Kirsch's essay on Winters tells us much about how he approaches the business of criticism. For a start, he doesn't consider Winters to be a model critic at all.... Yet he finds that there is much to learn from him, 'as long as we are prepared to be irritated', and makes the paradoxical observation that '... to read Winters with profit means reading him with suspicion, even resistance.'" A Poet-Critic on Modernism and its Discontents
Christopher B. Teuton:
"... as the cover triptych depicts, the poet occupies a mediating, interpretive position from which he must see out of both lenses, a complex double-consciousness, which Gansworth negotiates with unflinching honesty." Embodying Life in Art
Albert Goldbarth:
"Wherein Goldbarth, Badgered by The Georgia Review into Conducting a Version of an Interview, Sighs and Accepts a Few Queries from Poets in the Audience, on the Condition that These Questions Come from the Bodies of Their Poems, and the Answers (Such as They Are) Come from the Bodies of Goldbarth’s Poems..."
Why All This Music?
Edward Sanders:
"I bought Howl at the University of Missouri bookstore, and I memorized it. I used to shout it out to my beer-drinking buddies as we drove around the Independence courthouse square...." An American History, Line by Line: An Inverview with Edward Sanders
Jess Row:
"... there's something extraordinarily intimate, almost photographically transparent, in the way American poets of the last century have thought of their ancient Chinese counterparts... That this represents tremendous artistic and intellectual hubris seems hardly worth noticing anymore. We think we know what Chinese poetry is..." Frayed Rope for a Thousand Years
Cal Bedient:
"But in all four of the Fourcade books so far translated into English the method is hardly more than improv and a voluted development, an exfoliating proliferation like those fireworks that keep bam-ing out of their own previous outbursts. A dynamic exhaustion of the subject (at least it feels like exhaustion) is all that's possible. And just for that reason, it is art, today, that stands most to reason. Art's superiority lies in being the game that is on to the game. Only what is wildly juiced can approximate to what is by nature outrageously excessive." Metasexual Poetry
Stephen Burt:
"Poems about superheroes, famous or obscure, announce their divorce from expectations about high culture, antiquity, "academic" difficulty. At the same time, the same poems can draw an analogy between the cultural space of contemporary poetry and the referential mythos in which superheroes, and their super-readers, move. We read comics when we are ten, or twelve, or sixteen, and discover that our peers, at some point, expect us to set them aside; we write poetry, for ourselves and for our friends and for our classmates and teachers in poetry workshops, through college—and then we discover that the adult world has much less room for it. Contemporary poetry, in other words, looks now (it never looked quite this way to Jarrell, nor to Bowers) like a subculture, or a fan culture, pursued in adult life by devoted amateurs and struggling professionals who know that most people, most serious readers (of literary novels) find little time and less use for it in their adult lives." Poems About Superheroes
J. T. Barbarese:
"The Divine Comedy is not devoted to character in the Shakespearean sense. Dante's characters will never evolve or grow any farther; they do nothing to surprise us. They come to us literally from the end of time—as all commentators point out, from personal endtimes—and speak to us through the personal apocalypse whose hero is also its narrator. These characters have made their decisions and entered them in the book of time." Four Translations of Dante's Inferno
Sven Birkerts:
"Not-singing bears little or no relation to singing; not-dancing bears little or no relation to dancing—or so I say as an outsider. But by contrast there are a great many modes, or states, of not-writing that are closely bound to—are indeed, as philosophers might say, partially constitutive of writing. And this has everything to do with the question "what is writing?" For one thing, it makes the question vexing. For if writing is not defined as the putting of words to a surface, then what is it?" And What Is Writing
A. F. Moritz:
"Today, it seems to me, this isolation and communion question, as it relates to society and politics, has one formulation that is most important. Society certainly permits and in fact requires participation, but does it do so only at the cost of agreement to preordained structures and behaviors that are non-negotiable? In other words, can you only participate if you agree?"
What Man Has Made of Man
Eric Ormsby:
"I've never had the pleasure of fondling a trout. Like most of us, I've encountered that noble fish only when picking at its rosy flesh in a truite meunière with the tines of my fork, and even then gingerly. But when I read Hopkins' line 'for rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,' I feel for a moment as though my fingers have grazed the thing itself. I delight in this illusion partly because words, for once, seem to have acquired the quick slippery density of a living creature; to have assumed heft and texture; to have become equivalent to the object of which they are normally only the sign. Partly too, I admire it for the impossibility of the endeavor... As it happens, Hopkins' line was one that Elizabeth Bishop particularly admired..."
Ancient Chills
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
