Jocelyn W. Knowles:
A "make-believe job" at the Saturday Review of Literature brings a young, aspiring writer to the verge of literary glory in Jocelyn W. Knowles's "My Interview with W. H. Auden," this week's prose feature from the Fall issue of Michigan Quarterly Review: "I had a feeling I was not among friends but did not know what to make of it. Was it my earlier disarray? My youth? Something in my appearance? My voice? I had scarcely spoken. Perhaps Auden, who was new to America, had discovered too late the magazine was not the publication he thought it. There was a reputable one in London with a similar name. Kallman was busy with his cigarette. One, half-smoked, lay sputtering on his soup plate in bitter, acrid last gasps. Should I ask him to put it out?" My Interview with W. H. Auden
Carmine Starnino:
A poet's progress in "reboot[ing] Irish poetry's available modes;" the "'lyrical diary' of five aller-retours to Paris between 1994 and 2004;" a "dream-to-reason ratio perfect for replicating... 'the feminine subconscious, or semi-consciousness;'" a "bluffer's guide to merfolk;" and "the abba of a mysterious, and mysteriously moving, chiastic experiment" — Carmine Starnino brings us news of all this and more in "Five From Ireland," from the November issue of Poetry, this week's prose feature, reviewing recent books by Eavan Boland, Harry Clifton, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and Ciaran Carson. Five From Ireland
Kim Addonizio:
"Many writers harbor the desire to become successful poets and rise to the top of their profession. To see one's name on the cover of a slender paperback, to have tens and perhaps even hundreds of readers, to ascend to a lecture podium in a modest-sized auditorium after being introduced by the less successful poet who has been introduced in turn by an earnest graduate student unsure of the pronunciation of your name—these are heady rewards. Beyond these lie the true grail: generous grants, an endowed chair at a university, the big money that will allow you to write and remodel your kitchen, while freeing you from reading the incoherent ramblings of inferior wannabes. How can you realize your dreams? Follow this step-by-step advice." How to Succeed in Po Biz
Garry Wills :
"Martial—Marcus Valerius Martialis, c. 40–c. 102 CE— ... was like later gossip columnists, out night after night prowling for what they can devour by denouncing. He is a Winchell in elegiac distichs. Or, more properly, he is like the gossip columnist in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, who makes a living off the absurdities and vices of his own society by mocking them. He is a complicitous critic, half enjoying what he sneers at, mixing entertainment with revulsion. He is a reforming voyeur, a compromised Savonarola. It is a complex role, not reducible to any one of its components... What connection might Martial have with modern America? Well, like the Romans, we Americans celebrate rural virtue while wallowing in urban vices." Rome's Gossip Columnist: Introduction to Martial's Epigrams
Colin Dayan:
"[Aimé] Césaire once quipped that anyone confused by his politics should seek it in his poetry. He seemed, at times, an advocate of poésie pure, a follower of Mallarmé’s craft of absence and elimination, especially in Les armes miraculeuses. But his poems also bear witness to the harsh realities of life in a colonial outpost under Vichy rule. He meant the “miraculous weapons” to be arms for the struggle against colonialism, as well as, in and of themselves, poetic annunciation. Behind the flames, grasses, guava, and hibiscus of his impossible landscapes, one catches sight of the lashing of bodies and rotting flesh, the stench of slave ships, the postures of sanctimonious politicians." Out of Defeat: Aimé Césaire’s miraculous words
Robert von Hallberg:
"It is unusual for lyric poets to inquire into civic bonds, and poets have rarely been pulled to the bosom of the American polity (Whitman is the grand exception). Indeed, there is a familiar literary tradition of configuring politics—as Ezra Pound did—as a contest between reasons of state and individual autonomy. Yet in recent years the most distinguished political poems have all engaged precisely the issue of what holds citizens together in a community, and with what consequences, intended and otherwise. In particular Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Frank Bidart, C. K. Williams, and Robert Pinsky have produced important and surprising explorations of contemporary civic solidarity." Poets and the People: Reflections on solidarity during wartime
Peter Cole:
"I'm as suspicious of my own moral inclination, or inclination to the moral, as I am interested in following it out along a line of poetry... Hugh Kenner has written of the ways in which translation can take one to the secret places of the imagination one might not get to otherwise. The same holds true for the dynamic use of convention and conventional form, and also of so-called organic or open form employed in conscientious fashion. It’s ludicrous—but all too common—to think that one leads to the predictable in poetry, the other to a place of breakthrough, or that one is inherently moral and the other somehow dissolute. What matters, and what’s truly organic within a literary tradition, is finding the right form in relation to a given subject or set of materials. Otherwise one just has a manner." An Interview with Peter Cole
Brendan Galvin:
"Once you realize that writing is a process and nobody out there is waiting with bated breath for what you'll do next, you can relax a bit. It becomes a habit of being. Seeing a poem grow from my hand onto the page feels good to me, and I'm not in a race to finish it. It isn’t piecework. That film image of the suffering artist is a bourgeois American joke as far as I'm concerned, but it's interesting how many poets feel they have to buy into it. Almost as if that alleged suffering is a justification for what they do, and the public will have more regard for them if they claim to sweat and toil. You’re lucky if you manage to get the time to go along with your inclination to write. It's not a curse; it’s a chance to give yourself an authentic life instead of an excuse." Atlantic Flyway To Whirl is King:
An Interview with Brendan Galvin
Clive James:
"Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention. To take the most startling possible example, think of "Spring," by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone knows the first line because everyone knows the poem. "Nothing is so beautiful as Spring" is a line that hundreds of poets could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way: designed, that is, to be merely unexceptionable, or even flat. Only two lines further on, however, we get "Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens" and we are electrified.... I wonder if there can be any successful poem, even the one disguised as an unadorned prose argument, which is not dependent on this ability to project you into a reality so drastically rearranged that it makes your hair fizz even when it looks exactly like itself." Little Low Heavens
Mark Halliday:
"My poems have often been described as very self-conscious. This is sometimes given as a reason for disliking them. In most of my poems, the speaker is aware that he's trying to say something on an occasion, under pressure, and that the saying is difficult. In some cases, this self-awareness becomes explicitly the awareness that 'I'm trying to write a poem here.' Now, this note is struck in countless poems by some poets older than me, of course. It's in Koch and O'Hara; it's in Bidart's great poem 'Golden State'; it's in some poems by Robert Pinsky, and Billy Collins, and Albert Goldbarth, and Robert Hass (just to name a few). But I carry it pretty far. Pinsky once advised me not to overdo it with the poems about writing, poems about being a poet. And I try not to allow a given manuscript to be swamped with such poems. I understand that such poems are very off-putting to some readers. However, again, my own path to truth seems often to require this explicit self -consciousness." "Heavy Trash": A Conversation with Mark Halliday
Martha Ronk:
"Many of Barbara Guest's poems work with vivid and unforgettable images—architectural, pictorial, swirling images that dissolve and nest and metamorphose. Her ekphrastic images, specifically, move away from the body of the text into their own space, offering the pleasures of opacity by obscuring, contradicting, or causing friction with other aspects of the poem." A Foreign Substance, a critical response to Barbara Guest's poem, "Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights"
Marion K. Stocking:
"Although the poems of Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish captured me first by their lyric power, I cannot read them without remembering history. Since the 1947 partition of Palestine to create the state of Israel three-quarters of the land reserved then to the Palestinians has been appropriated by Israeli settlements and restraints such as the separation wall. Darwish's homeland is by many accounts the most crucial tension area in today's tense world. The Palestinian people consider Darwish something like a poet laureate. What better guide can I imagine into this region in crisis than a poet whose work is not primarily polemical but nevertheless speaks compellingly from its cultural and political nexus. Darwish, like Yeats, understands that the quarrel with others produces rhetoric, the quarrel with oneself, poetry." Translation: Text and Context, reviewing books by Mahmoud Darwish and Fady Joudah
Harry Gilonis:
"There will... be those worried by the betrayal of the 'task of the translator'. When Ezra Pound first published his 'Homage to Sextus Propertius' a Professor of Latin was moved by lines like this—'Nor is it equipped with a frigidaire patent'—to write complaining of Pound's competence. The reply, beginning 'Cat-piss and porcupines!!', seems mild in the circumstances. I promise to respond in like vein to critics who manage to notice all by themselves that there were no tanks in Powys in the 850s. What is at issue is what Hugh Kenner called 'cultural subject-rhyme'—and, if it can be carried off, the topological transformation, as it were, of the 'co-ordinates' of the original poem. In any case, better mendacities than the classics in paraphrase. Yesterday cannot be today, for 'Wales cannot endlessly remain / chasing sheep into the twilight'. 'Not altogether dark': Some Remarks on My unHealed Poems
Michael Almereyda:
"Even at this distance—more than seventy-five years after his death and nearly twenty years after the collapse of the government he fervently promoted—it remains difficult to account for the phenomenal nature, the sheer outlandishness, of Vladimir Mayakovsky. As unofficial poet laureate of the Russian Revolution ("my revolution," he called it) Mayakovsky had unrivaled authority and glamour, taking on multiple responsibilities and roles—orator, playwright, magazine editor, stage and film actor, poster maker, jingle writer—with a singular mix of self-mockery and martyrdom." Introduction to Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky
Brenda Wineapple:
"'Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" Thomas Wentworth Higginson opened the cream-colored envelope as he walked home from the post office, where he had stopped on the mild spring morning of April 17 after watching young women lift dumbbells at the local gymnasium. The year was 1862, a war was raging, and Higginson, at thirty-eight, was the local authority on physical fitness. This was one of his causes, as were women's health and education. His passion, though, was for abolition. But dubious about President Lincoln's intentions—fighting to save the Union was not the same as fighting to abolish slavery—he had not yet put on a blue uniform. Perhaps he should.
Yet he was also a literary man (great consolation for inaction) and frequently published in the cultural magazine of the moment, The Atlantic Monthly, where, along with gymnastics, women's rights, and slavery, his subjects were flowers and birds and the changing seasons.
Out fell a letter, scrawled in a looping, difficult hand, as well as four poems and another, smaller envelope. With difficulty he deciphered the scribble. 'Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?'" Introduction to White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Charles Simic:
—They're not really object poems.
—What are they then?
—They are premonitions.
—About what?
—About the absolute otherness of the object.
—So, it's the absolute you've been thinking of?
—Of course.
Form is the visible side of content. The way in which the content becomes manifest. Form: Time turning into space and space turning into time simultaneously.
I admire Claude Levi Strauss's observation that all art is essentially reduction and Gertrude Stein's saying that poetry is vocabulary.
Chance as a tool with which to break up one's habitual associations. Once they're broken, use one of the pieces to launch yourself into the unknown.
We name one thing and then another. That's how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there's a lot of space inside words.
The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks
Don Paterson:
On the morning the Barbarians wandered through the gates, everyone in Rome had their feet up and was reading a foreword.
The aphorism is a brief waste of time. The poem is a complete waste of time. The novel is a monumental waste of time.
The aphorism: too much too soon or too little too late, but never just enough for the time being.
Yes I know Marcus Aurelius or Vauvenargues or Chesterton has already said this, and far more elegantly; but let's face it, you weren't listening then either.
Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work, and Death—Aphorisms
Lucia Perillo:
"In what computer people call the meat world, I wrote always in a place that had a window. Otherwise there's not much to say (a door rests on top of two filing cabinets that have been moved from window to window). Of more interest is the internal studio. What to call it—encephalic? Virtual? Made-from-meat-yet-not? The broodio? The stain?" No Exit
David Orr:
"Shortly before Ohio's Democratic primary, Tom Buffenbarger, the head of the machinists' union and a supporter of Hillary Clinton, took to the stage at a Clinton rally in Youngstown to lay the wood to Barack Obama. 'Give me a break!' snarled Buffenbarger, 'I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine.' And then the union rep delivered his coup de grace: 'He's a poet, not a fighter!'
"Ouch.
"Fortunately, this insult to the sacred mysteries of Poesie didn't go unanswered—within a few days, the poet John Lundberg angrily riposted at the Huffington Post, declaring that he "would be happy to step outside" with Buffenbarger to show him that poets can indeed mix it up." The Politics of Poetry
Stanley Plumly:
"... now that the newness of Rome has worn off and the reality of his illness escalated, Keats has entered not only his posthumous time but a posthumous space. He is beginning to realize that memory is all he has, and that memory, too, is killing him. He has been sent into exile, in effect alone with and among images of Tom and his sister and Fanny Brawne and friends he has disappointed and who have disappointed him. And now that, more and more, the small circumference of his outside, present world is getting smaller and smaller—like his window on the Spanish Steps and the lapping boat fountain and the noise of life in motion—and now that Rome itself—looming in its timelessness and ruins—feels like the afterlife and now that the very shape of his bedroom is taking on the shape and depth of a grave, with the patterned roses on the ceiling emblemizing what he will see there, now that his confinement is nearly complete, it is his mind that is all he has, because his body, within itself, is disappearing." Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography
Forrest Gander:
"Beijing
Twenty poets speaking seven languages on a field trip to the outskirts of Beijing. A birdless summer day, no insect whirr. We enter the gate of the Summer Palace as a horde, then dissolve into pairs. Without his Persian translator, Emran Salahi is pensive, mute. I trail him through The Hall of Dispelling Clouds, past its discolored statuary and dusty tapestries symbolizing, say the placards, eternal power. Wandering to the corner of a side room, I peer around a painted screen and find, in the back warren, an old man face-down on a table strewn with syringes.
Behind everything
I see, something I don't
Know how to look for."
David Rivard:
"Does Rimbaud matter anymore? Modernist frontiersman, punkrock avatar, Beat seer, hallucinatory trip master, psychosexual sailor, litterateur as homeless street urchin—after a century or more of reinterpretations and idolizing, Rimbaud's name echoes through literary life like that of a highly diversified brand. The escapades of writers like Hart Crane, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Mailer, Frank O'Hara, and Jim Carroll (not to mention their more studied descendants) have made the role of the voyant a kind of franchise. In a culture where the machinery of consumption scarfs up and then test-markets nearly every act of revolt and every critique directed at it—in an age when Attitude and Mania are the names of clothing lines sold by Armani—Rimbaud seems pretty harmless really, a costume more than an influence." A Note on Stephen Berg's Rimbaud: "... still unilluminated I ..."
William Logan:
From The New Criterion, the latest installment of William Logan's Verse Chronicle, reviewing recent books by Ted Kooser, Melissa Green, Elizabeth Spires, Campbell McGrath, Marie Howe, and Jorie Graham: Valentine's Day Massacre
Maureen N. McLane:
"Emily Dickinson: post-9/11 poet? I began to consider this question after returning to Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, her kaleidoscopic, deeply researched, brilliantly written 1985 tour-de-force, which has been reissued with a new introduction by Eliot Weinberger.... Howe's book is simultaneously a dazzling exploration of Dickinson’s power and an anatomy of the American cultural imaginary. 'The vivid rhetoric of terror,' Howe writes, 'was a first step in the slow process of American Democracy.' This rhetoric of terror—fueled by a double legacy of Calvinist predestinarianism and violent frontier experience—animates some of Dickinson’s best work." This Ecstatic Nation: Learning from Emily Dickinson after 9/11
Seamus Heaney:
"The history of poetry contains many accounts of what might be called poetic recognition scenes, meetings where the poet comes face to face with something or someone in the outer world recognized as vital to the poet's inner creative life, and accounts of these meetings represent some of the highest achievements in the art. When a practitioner describes an encounter with a living or dead master, or an equivalent moment of epiphany, something fundamental is usually at stake, often having to do with poetic vocation itself. At the level of autobiography, such scenes record crucial events in the growth or reorientation of the poet's mind; at the mythic level, on the other hand, they can be read as evidence of a close encounter between the poet and the muse." 'Apt Admonishment': Wordsworth As an Example
"What Is It Anyway?"
"Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley." (Charles Simic)
"Poetry is energy, it is an energy-storing and an energy-releasing device." (Miroslav Holub)
"Poetry is the eroticization of thought—psychic vitality." (Cal Bedient)
"A poem... is the attire of feeling: the literary form where words seem tailor-made for memory or desire." (Carol Ann Duffy)
"What Is It Anyway," from Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry, edited by Dennis O'Driscoll
Peter Campion:
"Criticism of protest poetry appears often enough to be familiar. But with two recent essays in response to Poets Against the War, both W. S. Di Piero and David Wojahn offer a more forceful articulation. They point to an irony: Not only does most protest poetry remain mere versified opinion, but it tends strangely to mirror the smugness it rails against... To understand the uniquely American directions such a quarrel can take, and to see how it can mount effective protest against the political structures we live inside, I want to look at two very different passages from Whitman." The Wolf, the Snake, the Hog, Not Wanting in Me: American Poetry and Political Protest
Willard Spiegelman:
"It's a clear fall day in mid-October, 1961. Outside, the leaves on the maple and gingko trees are fiery crimson, those of the oak bright yellow. Subtler shades also abound. Open windows give onto high school playing fields, from which the sounds of the marching a band, rehearsing for Friday's football game against our archrivals, float in. Eighteen of us—high school seniors bound mostly for Ivy League colleges and all biting our fingernails about applications whose outcomes we shall not know for another five months—are having the time of our lives. We are reading the Aeneid." Unforced Marches: A Virgilian Memoir, essay/review of The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles.
Robin Ekiss:
"Though widely admired in England and Ireland over the last forty years—and embraced by poets as diverse as Billy Collins and Stephen Spender—at eighty-two, New York poet Samuel Menashe has always faced difficulty placing his work with American publishers. In 2004 he was named the first "Neglected Master" by the Poetry Foundation, which arranged the publication the next year of a volume of new and selected poems published by the Library of America. As if to demonstrate the extent of his neglect, the New York Times misspelled his name in the caption beneath his photo in its announcement of the award." No Small Feat, reviewing Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks
David Wojahn:
"...we tend to be of two minds when we read poets' career-spanning collections, especially when we are revisiting in a new context the work of poets we've known before. On the one hand, Selecteds tempt us to impose a narrative, an archetype—we see the writer's promising (or wobbly) beginnings as often as not give way in midcareer to a new sort of authority and vitality... But... poets don't turn into butterflies; they don't typically get reborn like Saul on his way to Damascus. Instead, if they're fortunate, they get older. And perhaps, as their waistlines and CREF accounts expand, by increments, in a slow and compelling fashion that is ultimately just as mysterious as Berryman's oracular notion of reformation, they get better. Witness the four Selecteds under discussion here, all exemplary." By Increments, reviewing recent Selected Poems by Albert Goldbarth, Bruce Beasley, Carl Phillips, and Ellen Bryant Voigt
Stephen Burt:
"It seems to me that Kasischke has invented a new way for verse to sound. Her poems are like rollercoasters, full of gradual rises and emphatic drops; they set the wildly variable forward motion of her lines (sometimes a few syllables, sometimes a lengthy mouthful) against the kinds of closure produced by sentence-endings, echoes, and full rhymes." The Speed of Life, reviewing Lilies Without, by Laura Kasischke
Andrew Motion:
"Anne Stevenson is one of the most remarkable poetic voices to have emerged on either side of the Atlantic in the last fifty years. Her work covers an impressively wide range—from large-scale narratives to finely wrought lyrics—and is cleverly tuned to history but full of edgy individuality. In certain respects her achievement has been properly recognized: she has won several important prizes and generally found critical approval. Yet because she has never found the large general readership that she deserves, she can also be called a "neglected writer." Although the phrase has an inevitably melancholy ring to it, in Stevenson's case it is also proof of quality." Introduction to Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems
Herbert Leibowitz:
"In 1951 and 1952, William Carlos Williams suffered incapacitating strokes, what neurologists call insults to the brain. The first occurred on March 28, 1951 at home in 9 Ridge Road. Williams had been caught up in a whirligig of work, keeping office hours, pushing himself to complete and revise his Autobiography, giving a series of readings along the Northeast Corridor from The New School to Yale to Wellesley College, including a benefit for an ailing Kenneth Patchen, a New Directions poet too poor to afford insurance. Such a schedule might have fazed a man half his age. The stroke that left his speech slurred and his eyesight askew sent Williams in critical condition to the Intensive Care Unit at Passaic General Hospital." The Lion in Winter
Floyd Collins:
"Philip Schultz writes a poetry of embattled celebration, avidly embracing an aesthetic composing equal portions of dross and ether. Who else among contemporary poets harbors a guardian angel named Stein, a shabbily pinioned seraph whose breath reeks of pickled herring, a self-proclaimed 'flatulent Talmudist / seized with Solomonic wisdom'?... a wry and sometimes raucous sense of humor prevents his poetry from lapsing into the solipsistic maunderings so characteristic of the Confessional mode. To write of one's personal obsessions and abiding passions, particularly in light of an irretrievable past, requires a measure of courage and dignity that Schultz possesses in abundance." Embattled Celebration: The Recent Poetry of Philip Schultz
Mark Ford:
"'I love your poems in Poetry,' James Schuyler wrote to Frank O'Hara after reading a batch that included 'Radio' and 'On Seeing Larry Rivers's Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art' in the March 1956 issue of the Chicago magazine. 'In that cutting garden of salmon pink gladioli,' he continued, 'they're as fresh as a Norway spruce. Your passion always makes me feel like a cloud the wind detaches (at last) from a mountain so I can finally go sailing over all those valleys with their crazy farms and towns. I always start bouncing up and down in my chair when I read a poem of yours like "Radio," where you seem to say, "I know you won't think this is much of a subject for a poem but I just can't help it: I feel like this," so that in the end you seem to be the only one who knows what the subject for a poem is.'" Introduction to Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems
Jacquelyn Pope:
"'I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood,' wrote Audre Lorde in her essay, 'The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.' Poet, activist and icon, Lorde profoundly shaped the women's and gay liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s, and her words resonate powerfully today. This comprehensive biography, the first about Lorde to be published, fully renders Lorde's life and legacy, providing a vivid account of the development of her activism and documenting the evolution of her ideas over the course of her working life." Review of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde
Peter Gizzi:
"I guess I am suggesting here the role of not-knowing that plays itself out in the writing of poetry. That this not-knowing plays a signal role in the production of reality in a poem. I like the word bewilderment because it has both be and wild in it, and I can imagine also wilderness inside it as well. As to certainty or authority in my work, I prefer the word inevitability—that is to say, meaning in a poem can be at once random and inevitable, and not-knowing can come to some sort of order that allows meaning to happen, mystery. A simpler way to say this is that I write to discover what I might know only in the act of making the poem itself." Interview with Robert N. Caspar
Roger Gilbert:
"We stand at the threshold of a Golden Age of octogenarian poetry. Even if we make allowances for changing life spans, such poetry was extremely scarce before the twentieth century. Few of the great poets who survived to old age produced enduring work in the latter part of their lives... But now the floodgates are about to open wide, as the extraordinarily rich generation of American poets born between 1925 and 1930 reaches the eighty-year milestone... Within this distinguished cohort, the four poets under review have achieved particular prominence. John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and Adrienne Rich may seem like an oddly matched quartet, yet while their styles and commitments differ in fundamental ways, all four of them enjoy the closest thing to stardom that our culture affords its poets." Whiz Kids at Eighty (I), reviewing recent collections by Robert Bly and Donald Hall
Paul Dean:
"Any biographer of Ezra Pound needs a clear head, a cool and dispassionate style, and first-rate literary-critical powers. Of David Moody's two predecessors, Noel Stock (1960) had only the first two, and was inhibited by the control exercised over his work by Pound's widow, while Humphrey Carpenter (1988) had the first two, but not consistently—his readability coming at the price of some journalistic slickness—and did not pretend to the third. Moody has all three. His book, the first of two volumes, will be a godsend to people like myself, who have spent decades feeling obscurely guilty about their lack of enthusiasm for Pound, and wondering why others, whose judgment they admire, hold him in high regard." Luminous Details, reviewing Ezra Pound: Poet, Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920
Linda Gregerson:
"Poets love to construe themselves as oppositional, at odds with public decorums and public affairs. But recent decades suggest that American poets are no longer convinced that civic scale and private consciousness, philosophical reach and local idiom, historical imagination and lyric authenticity, are inherently inimical to one another. Nor that public speaking must suppress an active and critical mind." Ode and Empire
James Longenbach:
"In every case, however the line is shaped, what will matter is not the line as such but the relationship of the line to the poem's syntax—to the unfolding structure of the poem's sentences. That relationship is endlessly various. Short lines or long lines don’t inevitably function in any particular way. A rhyming line doesn't necessarily function differently from a free-verse line. In the end, line doesn’t exist as a principle in itself. Line has a meaningful identity only when we begin to hear its relationship to other elements in the poem." Excerpt from The Art of the Poetic Line
Eric LeMay:
"Maybe they're right. Maybe there's much to celebrate about a room full of young people who are aware of the demands love makes, who don't buy the lacy lies we tell on Valentine's Day or after a hit of ecstasy. Believing love is work is certainly better than believing it's effortless, ceaseless bliss. So maybe I should feel relieved that my students aren't willing to see two teenagers who meet at a banquet, dance once, flirt, get engaged, deceive their parents, marry, have sex, commit multiple murders, fake death, then die in an exquisite double suicide aren't really in love."
Star-Crossed Something-or-Others
Adam Kirsch:
"Once the modern poet has been defined... not as his age's interpreter but as its exemplary specimen or willing victim, all the virtues and vices of modern poetry, up to the present day, become almost inevitable. The virtues are daring honesty, subtle self-knowledge, an intimate (if not always explicit) concern with history, and a determination to make language serve as the most accurate possible instrument of communication, even at the risk of estrangement. The vices, which correspond to the virtues and call them into question, are sentimental egotism, an obsession with staying up-to-date, and a belief that distortion of language is interesting and praiseworthy in its own right." Introduction to The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry
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
