Poetry Daily Prose Features

• Christopher Buckley:
  "Deep down, in the darkest part of the heart, no matter how modest we have become or profess to be, doesn't every writer - woken in the middle of the night for an immediate Yes or No - wish for Fame?"
  "Fame & Fortune, or, I am not Christopher Buckley"
  
  
• James Longenbach:
  "Writers have withered into variety, excess, and vulgarity; writers have withered into purity, stillness, and restraint. Why do the latter values so often get bad press, even from artists who embrace those values themselves?"
  "Purity, Restraint, Stillness"
  
  
• David Barber:
  "It seems to me that the future of memory is more and more bound up with the future of poetry, another form of human endeavor that has perhaps seen better days."
  "Does Memory Have a Future?"
  
  
• Robert Hahn:
  "Koethe offers the self as a clinical case-study, suggesting that most of our lives are exactly this ordinary and proposing that any life, looked at as directly as possible, illuminates the universal life, the experience of being a conscious human – an experience less distinctive than we care to think, and doomed to fade into oblivion."
  "A Waiting Heart," on John Koethe's Sally's Hair
  
  
• Eamon Grennan:
  "The whole issue of lyricism is about fragmentation, for me anyway. The moment. The fragment. Fracture. The things seen in passing. The notion that things halt but only in our imagination for a half a second and poetry is an attempt to slow things down a bit and hold on."
  "When Language Fails: An Interview with Eamon Grennan"
  
  
• David Bottoms:
  "Before we can fathom out whatever sense there might be behind the world, we have to be true to the world itself. The poet, I think, should make the world accessible to the reader, should not simply tell the reader about the world, but as far as possible through the written word, the poet should allow the reader to experience the world. And therefore arrive first hand at whatever insights the world has to offer."
  David Bottoms, An Interview with William Walsh
  
  
• Marion K. Stocking:
  "It is clear why Merwin titled this new collection Migration. As in many great narratives, from Homer, Dante, and Chaucer, to traditional tales and ballads, to early explorers' narratives that Merwin feasted on, the journey provides the structure for much of his poetry."
  Books in Brief: "always beginning as it goes"
  
  
• Ron Slate:
  "[Floyd Skloot]... is gaining notoriety at large as "the writer who got sick," an identity of convenience promulgated by reviewers of his essays on illness and loss of memory... The poetry, too, has often made illness its subject since the early 1990s. But unlike the satisfactions of the essays, the pleasures of Skloot's poetry do not derive from entertaining insights into a timely subject. The pleasure comes from experiencing an evasion of doom through a careful regard of the world expressed through traditional forms."
  "Floyd Skloot's Approximately Paradise"
  
  
• Jennifer Clarvoe:
  "James McMichael's new book-length poem, Capacity, is... concerned with the grounds of human looking, in ways that seem to pick up and extend the challenge offered by modernist investigations like [Marianne] Moore's... McMichael's account of the genesis of a wave in "Above the Red Deep-Water Clays"... offers a scene seemingly empty of the human seer, but the language is haunted, and signs of our perspective are everywhere."
  "'The silences themselves are telling': James McMichael's Capacity"
  
  
• David W. Gilcrest:
  "In this so-called Age of Information, it is becoming increasingly common for one's experience of poetry to be framed and mediated by digital devices and their screens, as the plethora of websites and online 'journals' now devoted to poetry will attest... In this essay I would like to praise Paper, or rather, the role Paper can play in contesting the mutation of poetry into mere data and in preserving the vital bond between Word and World."
  "Encomium to Paper"
  
  
• Madge McKeithen:
  "My son's illness is eight years old and has no name. It started when he was fourteen. He is now twenty-two. It is taking away his ability to walk and to reason... With a diagnosis, like it or not, you belong somewhere. Without a diagnosis, nowhere. There is no group for Those Waiting to Know. No national organization. No informational brochures. But you can curl up in a poem and sometimes find what you need - a way to wait, humility, perspective, love - to go back out."
  "A Coming to Terms"
  
  
• W. D. Snodgrass:
  "I'm at odds... with writers who believe that their first thoughts are their best, those worth keeping. As for my first thoughts, they are usually things someone else told me I ought to (and had pretty damned well better) believe; they've been got up in the most politically acceptable, neutral language, devoid of character or personality."
  "APR in the Studio"
  
  
• Robert Pinsky:
  "The world's least postmodern poem. Pain, rage, terror, panic heartfelt and body-felt without protective irony or afterthought or sneaking reservations. The horror fortissimo, unqualified..."
  "No Picnic"
  
  
• Stephen Dunn:
  "Like opium or free writing, avoidance may get you into a poem, but rarely out of one. After all, it takes a lot of things-in-place to become a merely decent poet."
  "One Summer: Musings about Avoidance,
  Temperament, and the Poem Becoming a Poem"
  
  
• David Lehman:
  "A. R. Ammons had reason to consider himself, as he capriciously put it in a late poem, a 'drab pot' – 'top bard' spelled backwards partly to conceal and partly to revel in the distinction. A solitary figure, self-made and largely self-taught, he approached the centers of literary industry as an outsider and from a distance."
  Introduction to A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems
  
  
• Two Prefaces:
  "La cultura... tiene la ventaja de ser inclusiva, tolerante, generosa, espontánea, democrática, vital y acaso el mejor medio para acercar a dos pueblos tan disímbolas como México y los Estados Unidos."
       — Hernán Lara Zavala
  "These paired anthologies represent the first of several official literary collaborations between Mexico and the United States designed to foster artistic exchange between our two great nations."
       — Dana Gioia
  From Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico and Líneas conectadas: Nueva poesía de los Estados Unidos
  
  
• Linda Gregerson:
  "To focus on rhetoric in the lyric poem is willfully to ignore, or to take with a grain of salt, the historical and heuristic divisions between poetry and public speaking. For poetry, like public speaking, has a suasive agenda: the poem may affect the contours of solitary meditation or unfiltered mimesis, the recklessness of outburst or the abstraction of music, but it always also seeks to convince, or coerce, or seduce a reader; it is never disinterested, never pure; it has designs on the one who listens or reads."
  "Rhetorical Contract in the Lyric Poem"
  
  
• Edward Hirsch:
  "Martín Espada believes that the pursuit of social and political justice can and must be joined to the quest for art. These ideals are for him inseparable. He is a Latino poet who takes his cue from Walt Whitman and dreams of an inclusive democracy."
  From Poet's Choice: Martín Espada
  
  
• Gerald Stern:
  "As Auden says, every translation of Cavafy, no matter by whom, 'is immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could possibly have written it.' It is, of all things, the 'self-disclosure,' the confession, that is translatable."
  Foreword to Aliki Barnstone's The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy
  
  
• Mary Jo Bang:
  "I will say that I never try to obfuscate. I may sometimes sacrifice completion, but when I do, I try to do it in the service of something else that I hope will give equal, or even greater, pleasure: music, or humor, or wordplay, or ambiguity that contains more meaning than the non-ambiguous would."
  Mary Jo Bang, Interviewed by Jennifer K. Dick
  
  
• Elaine Feinstein:
  "Akhmatova often sat smoking a cigarette at a side table, dressed in a tight skirt, with a scarf round her shoulders and a necklace of black agate. She was always surrounded by a group of admirers. Alexander Blok, the great poet of the preceding generation, found Akhmatova's beauty strangely terrifying. Mandelstam described her as 'a black angel' with the mark of God upon her."
  Anna of All the Russias
  
  
• Sandra M. Gilbert:
  "... the book you're reading now is in some sense experimental, mingling the techniques of different genres (autobiographical narrative, cultural studies, literary history) in an effort to ground my investigation of the poetics of grief in the complexity and richness of what, for want of a better word, I'll name 'the real.'"
  "A Matter of Life and Death"
  
  
• Claire Chi-ah Lyu:
  "Risk is the willingness to open up the limited and limiting circle of the familiar and the easy so as 'to be modified.' To receive the power of poetry, reader, critic, and teacher of poetry alike must 'be modified,' for the poet takes the risk of language that is 'modified by the world,' that eschews preconception."
  "A Sun within a Sun"
  
  
• John Hartley Williams:
  "On a coolish September morning, the Honda pointed its nose out of the German capital for Italy... Our destination was Lake Orta, for an unusual poetry festival."
  "The Lure of the Lake"
  
  
• Christopher Merrill:
  "Suddenly I realized that I too had to start from scratch – to wean myself from a taste for the grand and see anew. And isn't this what we demand of poetry – a fresh view of the matter? But this becomes more difficult with every passing year..."
  "Dismal Harmony"
  
  
• Sherod Santos:
  "When one translates into the language of the day, one is, to use your metaphor, grafting something onto the original that was never there in any preceding translation. And that something is, of course, the very material of our selves, the language by which we make sense of our experience."
  "The Continued Life: A Conversation with Sherod Santos"
  
  
• Robin Becker:
  In a new column, Women's Review of Books poetry and contributing editor Robin Becker provides news and commentary on poetry and the poetry world. In this issue of WRB: On Gail Mazur's "The Commons"
  Field Notes
  
  
• John Felstiner:
  "'It's... a lyric reaction to the world,' says George Oppen (1908-84), 'a sense of awe, simply to feel that the thing is there and that it's quite something to see.' Casual as this may sound, it speaks for a bracing view of existence."
  "'That they are there!' George Oppen's Psalm of Attentiveness"
  
  
• Meghan O'Rourke, J. Allyn Rosser & Eleanor Wilner:
  "Is there such a thing as 'women's poetry'? I hesitate to respond - in some ways the question seems to extend the nasty old habit of imagining women as 'other' or inferior. But let me offer a mixed-up answer: no, there is not. And yes, in a certain way, there is (though I'd prefer a different term for it)."
  Exchange: "Women's Poetry"
  
  
• Dennis O'Driscoll:
  "'A poem creates pleasure through the impossibility of completely grasping it.'" (Paul Hoover)
  "Dennis O'Driscoll Selects Recent Pronouncements on Poets and Poetry"
  
  
• David Young:
  "Years of studying and teaching, writing poems myself, translating poetry, and thinking hard and lovingly about the modernist poets have all led me to assemble this composite portrait. I have concluded that the modernist narrative is really many narratives at once and that modernist poetic practice as I understand and value it can best be demonstrated through close attention to six exemplary poems: Rainer Maria Rilke's 'The Bowl of Roses,' W. B. Yeats's 'Among School Children,' Wallace Stevens's 'Sunday Morning,' William Carlos Williams's 'January Morning,' Marianne Moore's 'An Octopus,' and Eugenio Montale's 'Mediterranean.'"
  from Six Modernist Moments in Poetry
  
  
• Joseph Parisi:
  "Very few poets can say so much in so little space as Kay Ryan... Aside from the shardlike fragments of Sappho or the sharpest haiku, it is unusual to find such compression of thought and deftness of touch as are typical in her minimalist art."
  from 100 Essential Modern Poems
  
  
• Dorianne Laux:
  "Some days my mind is lined with shelves arranged by image, object, gesture, tone of voice. There are drawers bulging with phrases from childhood..."
  "APR in the Studio"
  
  
• B. H. Fairchild:
  "There are perfectly natural reasons, including the usual psychological ones, for family, especially parents, to appear in one's poems. However, in my case they were also playing out a quintessentially American story..."
  "A Conversation with B. H. Fairchild"
  
  
• Jacqueline Osherow:
  "Koralnik... called Yiddish a language without mazl. He meant that Yiddish is a language that refuses to take luck into consideration... It's this world-view, this insistence on believing not in destiny, but in character and talent – that character and talent are destiny – that makes Yiddish so profoundly compatible with America... I want to argue that the great American Yiddish poets were great American poets, that theirs was very much an American literary enterprise."
  "American Mazl: Yiddish Poets in the New World"
  
  
• Mary Karr:
  "To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry – a journal founded in part on and for the godless, twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals – feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO's 'Real Sex Extra.'"
  "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer"
  
  
• William Logan:
  "It's surprising how many poets feel that poetry criticism should never be... critical. Yet these gentle readers love film and theater reviews that would eat the chrome off a car bumper. I write criticism not because it is a moral profession (it's a disreputable and second-rate calling and only likable as such) or because I secretly hate poetry - it may seem very odd to say (it's odder to have to say it) that I write criticism because I love poetry, and if I loved it less would never have written a critical word."
  "Introduction: Poetry in the Age of Tin"
  
  
• Forrest Gander:
  "I am interested in evolution and in the proliferation of poetries. I know that only the collective assemblage of fossils, of enunciations, can establish the character of a system. We readily find Derek Walcott's poetry, but when we discover the apposing poetics of fellow islanders Kamau Brathwaite and Shake Keane, our scope widens and the meanings of Walcott's work change too. Poetry doesn't compete, Louis Zukofsky asserted; it is added to like science."
  "The Nymph Stick Insect: Observations on Science, Poetry, and Creation"
  
  
• Thomas Lux:
  "I think there's a fine line between true sentiment and sentimentality. One never knows where that line is exactly but knowing there is a line might help one stay on just the right side of it. One has to risk sentimentality to achieve true sentiment, I think."
  An Interview
  
  
• Don Paterson:
  "All evening, listening to his wonderful table talk, I found myself thinking: in six months you'll be dead, and I will have said that . . ."
  Aphorisms
  
  
• Natasha Sajé:
  "How should a book of poems be organized, and in what ways does it matter? How have poets shaped their books and what are the effects of those shapes?"
  "Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems"
  
  
• Dennis O'Driscoll:
  "The realization that - despite having renounced TV, cinema, DVDs, pubs, thrillers, golf, morris dancing, and just about everything else - the odds are stacked against my being able to tick off as read all of the books that anyone half-civilized should know fills me with panic. It is as if we are barely granted a sidelong glance at the world when it is time to leave it again."
  "The Library of Adventure"
  
  
• Amy Clampitt:
  "Something quite astonishing has ocurred. No, I haven't fallen either in or out of love, in any literal sense; I haven't changed jobs; I haven't been offered a contract for my novel. On the contrary..."
  "Letter of 17 March 1956"
  
  
• Roger Gilbert:
  "Readers of contemporary poetry have been taught to say that poems are about, if anything, themselves, the process of their creation, their relationship to language or tradition or culture, or something similarly abstruse. Yet there are signs that poems about more worldly matters may be making a comeback. Among these is a noticeable trend toward what could be called 'single-subject' collections..."
  "About Poems About"
  
  
• Marion K. Stocking:
  "All these poets have this sensuous sense of the depth of time – biological, historical, mythic. All at one point or another enter into the life of the old world of nature... The evolution of the human race weighs on these poems..."
  "Scandinavian, Germanic, and Slavic Poetry Today"
  
  
• David Ignatow:
  "... we aspire to immortality and we don't get it. We want it in our children, we want it in our literature, we want it in our own acts."
  "Speaking to the Extraordinary: An Interview with David Ignatow"
  
  
• Peter Sirr:
  "What is it about diaries? We live, of course, in an age of disclosure and the diary is the form of the age. And poets seem to be embracing the form as never before."
  "The Flat Cap"
  
  
• Brian Bartlett:
  "One of the toughest sorts of anthologies to edit is that of young poets in the early stages of being published. Editors of such books can find themselves cast in the role of uncomfortable prophets, or of adjudicators at a music festival, choosing the singers or pianists most likely to go on to become surpassing artists."
  Review of Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets
  
  
• James Wright:
  "... there was a time for me – as there was, inevitably, for every young poet writing in America right now – to commit himself to the traditional syntax and the traditional meters of English verse; for many of the writers who preceded us were so sloppy, that we had to begin not by revolting against competence and restriction, because except for a few writers there was no competence, but rather to begin by creating our own competence."
  Letter to Donald Hall, July 25, 1958
  
  
• Martín Espada:
  "Bilingualism enters into my work in a number of ways. First of all, I want to point out that bilingualism enters my work as a subject, that I frequently write about language politics, that I frequently write about the fear which the majority seems to have for the minority tongue, or tongues..."
  "Martín Espada, Interviewed by Brian Henry"
  
  
• Mark Halliday:
  "There is a counterprogressive, dysfunctionalizing rupture in the assertive assurance of antibourgeois vigilant outraged experimentalism in the United States of Megacapitalism today."
  "Vexing Praxis/Hocus Nexus"
  
  
• Ruth Padel:
  "... 'resistance': that is what is truly traditional; what creative readers value in all poems, from the past or from the present. One aspect of it is the subtlety which lets meaning be found through pattern. Not necessarily a rhyming or a regular pattern; any in which words make relationships with each other through sound, through their tactile being, as well as in all the meanings that can be woken from them."
  "Reading a Poem"
  
  
• Kathleen Ossip:
  "Winters demanded not logic, not reason: but reassurance. He required not coherence but explication. Comfort, really.
  
  "Winters thought he was attacking bad (scary) writers but really he was showing himself to be a technologically obsolete reader. He did not want to admit what he already knew."
  "The Nervousness of Yvor Winters"
  
  
• James Longenbach:
  "Wallace Stevens once remarked that while we possess the great poems of heaven and hell, the great poems of the earth remain to be written. Ashbery is writing those poems with the lack of fanfare that earth, for better and worse, deserves..."
  "Poetry Is Poetry"
  
  
• Philip Levine:
  "My mind drifted to the day I first got to know [Thom] Gunn well, the first day I truly shared with him, a day I hadn't mentioned to the reporter. For me it was an unusually long and rich day in Los Angeles, involving three other writers. Now all of them are dead and I'm the only one left to tell the story..."
  "A Day in May: Los Angeles, 1960"
  
  
• John Bayley:
  "Only the powerless really reveal the nature of power; only the nonpolitical understand the nature of politics. This is shown by... such poems of [Zbigniew] Herbert's as 'Five Men' and 'Preliminary Investigation of an Angel'."
  "The Art of Austerity"
  
  
• Thomas Lynch:
  "It was a poet who told me to go to Ireland. And poems that first made me want to go. And poetry that keeps the lights on now, in the house that Nora Lynch bequeathed to me."
  "On Some Verses by Irish & Other Poets"
  
  
• Stanley Kunitz:
  "I conceived of the garden as a poem in stanzas. Each terrace contributes to the garden as a whole in the same way each stanza in a poem has a life of its own, and yet is part of a progressive whole as well."
  "A Living Poem"
  
  
• Brian Kim Stefans:
  "W.S. Graham's New Collected Poems... not only returns Graham to the central narrative of 20th-century British poetry but should also mark his introduction to the United States as a major lyric poet. A daring technician teased, but not intoxicated, by visionary impulses, he belongs in the company of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane..."
  "Book of Storms"
  
  
• Michael Schmidt:
  "Why read Sappho today? She is, even among the first Greek poets, an incomparable artist, innovative in her techniques, unique in sensibility. Even in translation it is possible to sense the force of her thinking, the way in which she feels a way through experience with the special language that poetry devised."
  "Sappho of Eressus"
  
  
• Dana Levin:
  "This is the first of a three-part column that will explore the relationship between pressure – psychological, societal and aesthetic – and the development of poetic style... Unique and indelible styles often arise out of great personal trial and sometimes at great cost: hence the 'heroics' of the title."
  "The Heroics of Style, Part 1: Plath's 'I am'"
  
  
• Mary Kinzie:
  "Why should I believe there are poems waiting for me which I am not writing? Because I miss them, these shadows like birds dying of cold on the branches, their life diminished as I move closer to them. I frighten them with my nearness."
  "The Poems I Am Not Writing"
  
  
• David Bromwich:
  "When Americans turn to [the sonnet], they invest it with a glamour and an intensity equal to anything they have to show in more flamboyant or new-minted frames. Relish of the challenge of sonnet-writing, however, seems to have been a late-nineteenth- and a twentieth-century phenomenon."
  "American Sonnets"
  
  
• William Logan:
  "This surfeiting banquet, this pliant vagueness, of which Florida has more than its share, prove ever tractable to the poet's design... What separates the strongest poems that have used this giant semi-colon lying under the East Coast, this ornate bracket, from the mere stuff of journals or journalists, from the self-regarding or self-inflamed? The ability, not just to succumb to seductive myth, but to transform it."
  "The State with the Prettiest Name"
  
  
• Beth Ann Fennelly:
  "I confess, I've always loved flourish, sequins, and boas, always loved the theatre and costumes; and that's what the landscape provides here. There's more room for mystery and convolutions. Skeletons in the closet. Even the way things are always draped with vines. There's a great sign outside of town that says, 'Trespass,' because the kudzu has covered the 'No' and the 'ing.' And to me that just seems a metaphor because the landscape provides its own masquerade and doublespeak; it covers and reveals. There's a sense of play in the landscape."
  An Interview with Beth Ann Fennelly
  
  
• David Kirby:
  "As the American poet, Whitman is scrutinized, taken apart, reassembled, and categorized more than any other. Yet I find that often he ends up in the wrong pigeonhole. Some readers type him as an American original who sprang fully formed from the brow of Ralph Waldo Emerson; others take him for a Civil War hippie, a no-holds bard playing tennis without a net or even a racket. In this essay, I'll connect Whitman to two traditions that tell a lot more about him and his poetry, the ancient tradition of dithyrambic verse and that of "'the old, weird America.'"
  "Give Me Life Coarse and Rank"
  
  
• David Lehman:
  "Ammons comes as close to the American sublime as we get in modern poetry. In his work you find a sort of secular religiosity... Romantic that he is, Ammons seems to apprehend the divinity at the heart of natural things, or in the teleology of natural processes."
  "Archie's Sphere"
  
  
• Dennis O'Driscoll:
  "To move from Yeats's Tower to Dublin Castle, in or about which most of my working life has been spent, is a steep climbdown. Finding myself somehow possessed of a life, and unable to charge anyone else with responsibility for its maintenance and upkeep, I began working in Dublin as an Executive Officer in the Estate Duty Office when I was sixteen."
  An Interview with Dennis O'Driscoll
  
  
• James McConkey:
  "About twenty-five years ago, I dreamed I was a poet. I remember that dream for the happiness it brought me, a happiness that carried over to my conscious mind upon awaking. And yet, unlike nearly all prose writers... I had never, not even in my adolescence, tried to write a single poem."
  "A Song of One's Own"
  
  
• David Caplan:
  "But why study poetic form at all? Two reasons in particular recommend the subject. First, it obsesses twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poets, who compulsively frame historical and artistic challenges in formal terms... Second, there are many reasons to believe that our current understanding of poetic form, especially contemporary metrical verse, remains inadequate."
  "On Claimed Verse Forms"
  
  
• C. D. Wright:
  "Every year the poem I most want to write, the poem that would in effect allow me to stop writing, changes shapes, changes directions. It refuses to come forward, to stand still while I move to meet it...."
  from Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
  
  
• Cal Bedient:
  "Poetry is the eroticization of thought — psychic vitality. If it isn’t spending a sexless night in the Abstract Reasoning Motel, if it isn’t mere calculation or joyless analysis, thinking is an aesthetico-sensual activity, vivified and incarnate in the desiring body."
  An Interview with Cal Bedient
  
  
• Ted Kooser:
  "You choose what to write and how to write it, but if you want to earn an audience for your work, you need to think about the interests, expectations, and needs of others, as well as how you present yourself to them."
  "Writing for Others"
  
  
• Naeem Murr:
  "I worked on my poems for class as if I were defusing little bombs. Mrs. Fowles responded ecstatically, as ever. Then it was announced: a schoolwide poetry competition. A cash prize, and the winning poem would be displayed at the entrance to the school for the remainder of the year."
  "Don Nelson Sings Elvis"
  
  
• Stanley Plumly:
  "Beautiful views, vistas, lakes and mountains, are okay if you're a tourist, but to the working mind they tend to be a distraction, competition. It's best to turn your back in the presence of great landscapes; best to turn the chair around."
  "Studio"
  
  
• Thom Ward:
  "I know when I'm in the presence of a manuscript that I'm seriously considering sending a contract to for publication — that with all the minutiae that goes on in our lives, all the stimulus coming at us, the freneticism — what the manuscript does is it obliterates time and space."
  "Thom Ward's Mojo: Sounding Like Himself," An Interview
  
  
• Willard Spiegelman:
  "Just as Dove’s individual dance poems [in American Smooth] tacitly make us listen for a verbal music appropriate to the music of the ballroom, so all of the poems require us to make sense of their relation to one another. Dancing is only one of her subjects."
  "Rita Dove, Dancing"
  
  
• Ron Smith:
  "In a few more years, all the voices of the Twenties generation will be silent. Have we learned from their best work? Will we always have books like these?"
  "Old New Critics"
  
  
• David Orr:
  "In response to the question, 'Can a bad man be a good poet?' there are only two things to be said: 'Yes' and 'obviously.' In part, that's because the poetry world sets the bar fairly low for 'badness'...."
  "Bad Guys"
  
  
• Donald Revell:
  "Another world? I can only think of Paradise, the one place I entirely remember, not as it was, but as it IS."
  "Wine Instead of Whiskey for Awhile"
  
  
• Virgil Suárez:
  "Writers in other countries are jailed because of their beliefs or political views. The writers here need to be more world-conscious. They need to be more involved in their communities. Being a hyphenated writer, it all comes natural to me. I live in more than one world, more than one reality."
  "The Work We Leave Behind," An Interview
  
  
• From Gulf Coast's Emerging Authors Series – Two Interviews:
  Tracy K. Smith, "The Body's Boundaries, The Body's Questions"
  C. Dale Young, "There Is Light and There Is Dark"
  
  
• Dana Gioia:
  "Despite its derogatory associations, cult seems the right metaphor for the growing advocacy by writers for Weldon Kees. Cults flourish when established religions have lost their spiritual potency. His devotees share a fierce conviction that he is one of the best American poets of the last half century. To academic critics, this opinion probably seems either cultish superstition or charismatic excess."
  "The Cult of Weldon Kees"
  
  
• James Merrill:
  "You hardly ever need to state your feelings. The point is to feel and keep the eyes open. Then what you feel is expressed, is mimed back at you by the scene. A room, a landscape. I'd go a step further. We don’t know what we feel until we see it distanced by this kind of translation."
  "On 'Yánnina': An Interview with David Kalstone"
  
  
• Richard Howard:
  "The burden of our poets – and it is, I once said, speaking of one of the most touching figures among them, the first time in the history of poetry that human beings have been concerned and even compelled to write a poetry of forgetting – is to rise against the form in which they are writing; their burden is their longing to lose the gifts of order, recovery, convergence upon an end so that all might begin again ...."
  "Sharing Secrets"
  
  
• Albert Goldbarth:
  "The universe is nothing but incomprehensible multilayers, and all of our lives are examples of that... I don't know if my poems try to be true to that understanding out of any conscious project, but it is an implicit understanding that my poems generally have – that they are mimetic of a layered, interconnective cosmos."
  "An Interview with Albert Goldbarth"
  
  
• Robert Hahn:
  "When a mature, established poet continues to foreground his influences, what should we make of it? And further, if this poet has found an original voice, notwithstanding the influences from which it obviously derives, what accounts for the originality (since it is born of a practice which in another poet might produce mere pastiche or weak imitation)?"
  "'Drawing by Michelangelo, Color by Titian': Of Originality, Influence, and the Poetry of John Koethe"
  
  
• Eirik Steinhoff:
  "Edward Dorn (1929-1999) should need no introduction... But it is also understandable that Dorn would need an introduction... much of his work after Gunslinger functions as a department of disturbances, running athwart whatever linguistic, political, or cultural securities or sincerities we might hold. If he has not been absorbed into the canon of postwar American poetry it is exactly because he is unabsorbable. This is both the value and the difficulty of his work."
  "A Map of Locations," a preface to Edward Dorn, American Heretic
  
  
• Donald Hall:
  "Three years after we married — we lived in Ann Arbor, where I taught at the University of Michigan — Jane Kenyon and I decided to spend a year at my old family farm in New Hampshire. I had spent my childhood summers there, and it was my place of all places. It was the poetry house, domain of old farmers who told stories and spoke pieces memorized when they were young...."
  "To Eagle Pond"
  
  
• Dick Davis:
  "People of a particular linguistic community often automatically assume that their notion of what constitutes the 'poetic' is a universal notion, and this can lead to a sense of disappointment or embarrassment when they are confronted with highly praised artifacts from another culture and these artifacts do not conform to local aesthetic expectations; the end result of this can be, and I think often is, a smug sense – openly expressed by the crass, privately believed by the more circumspect – that really only 'our' literature is any good."
  "On Not Translating Hafez"
  
  
• Jean McGarry:
  "How do they bond themselves to their work in the way that they do? How do they compose the work, plundering their own lives much as novelists do, and yet see it as something separate and floating free of self? Why does their work sometimes achieve the solid status of an object? These were just my first questions."
  "A Prose Writer Looks at Poets"
  
  
• R. T. Smith:
  "I'm not going to claim that something potent, mysterious and sweetbitter has seeped its way into the creeks, rivers and wells of the Appalachian Mountains to make the people there particularly eloquent. Writing is harder work than that, and I'm not even going to suggest that all writers from the region carry something in their blood or their perspective that makes them especially observant, articulate, consequential or even colorful. What I do believe is that the mountains, once considered an obstacle to those skills necessary for adroit and memorable poetry, can be an incentive for them, and recent increases in education and mobility have resulted in a fluency either increased or unleashed...."
  "The Appellations Yet Rising: A Birdseye View of Poetry from the Appalachians"
  
  
• David Rivard:
  "... some days I have to pretend to be Issa writing 'Lord Randal' in order to get anything done around here."
  "The Interrupted Now"
  
  
• Timothy Donnelly:
  "With its 'laddish' working-class concerns, wry delivery, and formal wit, Paterson's poetry has been compared to that of the Movement poets, but the comparison only dimly captures his work's character..."
  "Nothing, in Other Words: On the Poetry of Don Paterson"
  
  
• Mark Jarman:
  "Like Shakespeare and the Bible, Ovid's book of changes has long been part of the air we breathe. Now Charles Martin with his new translation [Metamorphoses] reminds us that in these tales Ovid remains our contemporary."
  "Ovid, Our Contemporary"
  
  
• Jim Ferris:
  "... when I walk, some part of me is mindful of the output of energy, mindful of the pressure my brace puts on odd spots on my leg, mindful of the years of sores and scars and pain that have been some greater or lesser part of walking for me. I may enjoy the walk — I may even walk for pleasure — but when I walk, I aim to get somewhere. If my meters are sprung, if my feet are uneven, if my path is irregular, that's just how I walk. And how I write."
  "The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics"
  
  
• Adam Kirsch:
  "If criticism can make any contribution to this goal [great poetry], it is to help us break free from the post-romantic dialectic that obsessed poetry in the twentieth century. For there is a saner, more sophisticated, more humane tradition in criticism: the pragmatic tradition of Aristotle."
  "Out of the Republic, Into The Madhouse"
  
  
• A. R. Ammons:
  From a very special issue of EPOCH, devoted to the life and work of A. R. Ammons, three previously unpublished poems, accompanied by commentary on the poems by Robert Morgan, Alice Fulton, and Roger Gilbert:
  This Is Just a Place
  
  
• Dennis O'Driscoll:
  "'There is one important thing to say about poetry: you don't need to know a lot of it for it to have value and meaning in your life or the life of your society. Two or three poems, even two or three bits of poems, known by heart and genuinely cherished, can stand everybody in good stead.'" (Seamus Heaney)
  "Dennis O'Driscoll Selects Recent Pronouncements on Poets and Poetry"
  
  
• Marilyn Hacker:
  "The poet who wrote with chilling prescience in 1947 that 'The economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare', merits an attentive audience today, not as a doom-sayer (she never was that) but as a writer who reminds us of the possibilities of human connection and communication in and through poetry."
  "A poet you may want to know better: Muriel Rukeyser"
  
  
• Dana Gioia:
  "Reading at Risk is not a report that the National Endowment for the Arts is happy to issue. This reading presents a detailed but bleak assessment of the decline of reading's role in the nation's culture. For the first time in modern history, less than half of the adult population now reads literature, and these trends reflect a larger decline in other sorts of reading. Anyone who loves literature or values the cultural, intellectual, and political importance of active and engaged literacy in American society will respond to this report with grave concern." Preface to the NEA report,
  "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America"
  
  
• Robert Cording:
  "I want, then, in this essay to use Milosz's clarion call of a poem [from 'A Theological Treatise'] to elaborate on three ideas: the decadence into which Milosz feels the language of poetry has fallen; the old and new relationship between theology and poetry as I see it; and the relationship between what Milosz later calls 'reality' and 'an absolute point of reference.' My aim is to sketch what it means for our language 'to take into account a world we did not make.'"
  "Finding the World’s Fullness"
  
  
• Mark Halliday:
  "I have an intuitive attraction to the long line... I am often willing to sacrifice a crystallized or chiseled quality for the sake of the human reality that comes from showing the speaker making more noise in a 'real time' effort to say something. And so when the line goes out toward the right-hand margin, it's kind of a picture of that happening."
  "A Conversation with Mark Halliday"
  
  
• John Felstiner:
  "He does not meet him... But hadn't there already been an understanding, hadn't they been meeting all along, those years in Paris — the older man a more-or-less voluntary Irish exile to France and French, the younger man, orphaned, homelandless..."
  "Paul Celan Meets Samuel Beckett"
  
  
• Paul Zimmer:
  "He had his own view of the process: You decide you want to be a poet and you realize you must give your life to it. You write the best poems you can. 'Not every carpenter drives a nail the same way,' he said, 'and not all of them build the Taj Mahal.'"
  "William Metts, American Poet"
  
  
• Sandra M. Gilbert:
  "Is "British poetry" — and the question of the "Britishness" of this poetry is, as we'll see, a vexed and vexing one — American poetry's land of unlikeness? (And might the converse also be the case, with American poetry weirdly mirroring and perhaps distorting the lineaments of British verse?) Certainly the editors of New British Poetry are firm in their belief that until quite recently the verses produced by Anglophone poets on both sides of the Atlantic have evolved along such different lines as to constitute two separate poetic traditions."
  "Common Wealth"
  
  
• Dennis O'Driscoll:
  "A party at which all the guests are poets — and all the poets are gabbing non-stop about their own work — might not be everybody's mug of mead. One imagines the bouncers needing to separate squabbling bards rather than to eject groupies and gatecrashers lurking suspiciously behind the laurel hedge. Don't Ask Me What I Mean is a party thrown by the Poetry Book Society in London for its golden anniversary; and a very civilised occasion it actually proves to be."
  "The Party Line"
  
  
• Hayden Carruth:
  "I have never been and never would be, in any circumstances, a joiner. I did not like groups or organizations. I preferred independence, and I emphasized that in my poetry, in my prose too, I think, and in my life."
  An Interview with Hayden Carruth
  
  
• Kay Ryan:
  "Marianne Moore's poems are as contemporary as a Google search and as antique as wonder cabinets... She strikes me as at once ridiculous and immensely cheering. She is monumental, like a stern aunt, and all bits and pieces, like a pixilated one."
  Poetry in Review: The Poems of Marianne Moore
  
  
• Peter Johnson:
  "Though I can't prove it, I think the prose poem wants to be funny. If Kierkegaard is right that 'the comical is present in every stage of life, for wherever there is life there is contradiction,' then what genre could be more contradictory than the prose poem, with its oxymoronic name and paradoxical nature. It steals the techniques of verse and discourses of prose, then shows up at the party flaunting them in the most unlikely ways."
  Conversation with Peter Johnson
  
  
• John Barr:
  "Placing good poetry before the largest possible audience is like God’s work: You can never do enough of it, or too much of it. We want to deepen poetry’s importance to the American experience. We want to see poetry in the hearts and on the lips of people everywhere."
  A Conversation with John Barr
  
  
• James Longenbach:
  "Poets have been on the defensive at least since the time of Plato, and rightly so, since philosophers and literary critics have distrusted poetry. But poems do not necessarily ask to be trusted. Their language revels in duplicity and disjunction, making it difficult for us to assume that any particular poetic gesture is inevitably responsible or irresponsible to the culture that gives the language meaning: a poem's obfuscation of the established terms of accountability might be the poem's most accountable act — or it might not. Distrust of poetry (its potential for inconsequence, its pretension to consequence) is the stuff of poetry. And the problem with many defenses of poetry is the refusal to recognize that the enemy lies within."
  "The Resistance to Poetry"
  
  
• Garrison Keillor's Good Poems – Two Views:
  Dana Gioa, "Title Tells All"
  August Kleinzahler, "No Antonin Artaud with the Flapjacks, Please"
  
  
• Mary Oliver:
  "And now I am thinking of the poet Wordsworth, and the strange adventure that one night overtook him. When he was still a young boy, in love with summer and night, he went down to a lake, 'borrowed' a rowboat, and rowed out upon the water. At first he felt himself embraced by pleasures...."
  "Wordsworth's Mountain"
  
  
• James Fenton:
  ". . . we can be pretty certain that Tennyson was not thinking, 'Why don't I start a poem with something really obscure, like a molossus?' He had this bleak rhythm in his mind, and then he sought a line which would match it."
  "The Sense of Form"
  
  
• Michael Ryan:
  " 'It is not that it was so,' Aristotle says in The Poetics about the credibility of a story, 'but that it might be so': just one of the artistic thrills Dickinson must have felt writing 'I heard a Fly buzz when I died — ' was in testing how far Aristotle's principle can be extended, and extended in a poem (this poem). Solace is too pale a word for what the poet gets from the contingent renderings-in-language her poems yield to her (and to us)."
  "How to Use a Fly"
  
  
• Meghan O'Rourke:
  "Given the historical circumstances of Plath's death, it was perhaps inevitable that the poetry would end up being shortchanged. What's stranger is that the fascination with the life has not led to the benign neglect of the work, but has actually resulted in its being actively misread... her work is for the most part anything but adolescent and baldly confessional; rather, it's a mythic excavation of the unconscious. Her subject is the crucible of post-religious sentiment..."
  "Subject Sylvia"
  
  
• Edward Hirsch:
  "For me my writing is not just literary, it's personal. Some people divide up their experience between what happens to them in their family, or in their erotic life, and what they've read, and what they've thought. For me, it's all part of the same thing."
  "A Conversation with Edward Hirsch"
  
  
• Willard Spiegelman:
  "If there were a word for a style that takes the natural world as its subject without hankering after physical fulfillment, that combines lushness with austerity, visible bounty with spiritual doubt, and that proceeds by way of anecdotes that still manage to obscure important people, things, and events in the poet's present adult life — such as his wife and son — that word would be Wrighteous."
  "Landscape and Identity: Charles Wright's Backyard Metaphysics"
  
  
• Jon Volkmer:
  "In the last five years a spate of books have been published that undertake to instruct the reader in the understanding and appreciation of poetry, a good number of them by well-known poets... The books vary widely in tone, and taken together seem to play out a Pygmalionic debate. Who best to initiate Eliza into the high culture of poetry -- pedantic Professor Higgins, friendly Colonel Pickering, the mooning lover Freddy, or the critic in the back row of the theater who insists on letting her know that she's part of the show?"
  "Poetry Love Potions"
  
  
• Robert Wrigley:
  "I have to say I find the idea that narrative, which is to say 'story,' is out-dated a pretty silly notion indeed. I'm not sure if such a thing can truly be said to be an 'idea,' as a matter of fact. It's more like a coffee shop provocation... compelling in the way of most intellectual off-jerking... but finally just not true."
  An Interview with Robert Wrigley
  
  
• Dorothy Barresi:
  "Today's poetry, like the society it grows out of hardly seems 'repressed,' but black poetic humor still serves the important function of separating poetry -- and poets -- from the circumscribing rules of social decorum, leading us, as all good art must, to what Grotjahn calls 'islands of true freedom.' Poetry's black humor deflates pomposity and hypocrisy (our own as well as others'); it asserts our insights and our emotional growth (however fleeting); and it delineates highly individual poetic personas, one from the other."
  "Playing in the Dark: Black Humor and Poetry"
  
  
• Debra Weinstein:
  "This is the story of how I came to momentary prominence in the world of poetry and, through a series of misunderstandings, destroyed my good name and became a nobody."
  "What Is Poetry?," from Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. – A Novel
  
  
• Rowan Ricardo Phillips:
  
  Lets begin with a conclusion: Robert Hayden's sense of form
  Was sporadic — beautifully so — and was set in motion less
  By a cataloging of syllables and lines, but rather more
  
  By the carnival of the idea....
  
  "When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness: On Bard and Balladry in Robert Hayden - An Essay in Verse"
  
  
• Sebastian Matthews:
  "He had sprezzatura, as the Italians say, a certain flair in lifestyle accompanied by an air of disdain for one's own importance. On top of all that, he actually cared about other people — what they had to say, what they wrote in their poems. He was utterly without snobbery when it came to people. He could talk with anyone, would search out awkward students at the party and bring them into the conversation, playing a sort of mixed doubles with them, chasing down any ball they were too slow-footed to hit."
  "Song for My Father," from In My Father's Footsteps: A Memoir
  
  
• Henry Taylor:
  "The immortality motivation seems to me a place to entertain delusion. Neglect in the present is often a sign of something other than genius too lofty for its era; but one can embrace the thought, and go through life being six to eight weeks ahead of one's time."
  "What Writing Can Be": A Conversation with Henry Taylor
  
  
• Thomas Gardner:
  "Pollock's skeins of paint, seemingly live in the air, give Graham a way of visualizing what might happen if the space between the initiation of a gesture and its formal realization were opened up and examined — if the process of creation itself were extended.... I'd like to focus here on three well-known modern poems — Stevens' 'The Idea of Order at Key West,' Frost's 'Birches,' and Eliot's The Waste Land — that Graham engages with in The End of Beauty, tracing her attempts to extend what her predecessors suggested 'that in-between space [might be] capable of.'"
  "Jorie Graham's The End of Beauty and a Fresh Look at Modernism"
  
  
• Dennis O'Driscoll:
  "'Poetry, like all art, is a manifestation of other, deeper things. It can be too highly prized by the poet. It can never be too highly prized at the moment of a poet's or reader's engagement with it, but it can be crucially overestimated in a larger context.'" (Marvin Bell)
  Dennis O'Driscoll Selects Recent Pronouncements on Poets and Poetry
  
  
• Jane Hirshfield:
  "Language goes to the tall mirror on one wall and stands before it, wearing no makeup, no slippers, no clothes. In the same circumstances, we might see first our two eyes looking back at their own inquiry, or else, perhaps, glance down to the two legs on which vision stands. What language sees is also two-fold, what it sees is this -- the two foundation powers: image and statement. The first the wordless outer world and all its intricate treasure moving inward, into the self's interior realm, and the second something humanly made and moving outward: the answering mind and its multiform workings, travelling back into the world. All that is sayable begins with these two modes of attention, and their prolific offspring. Begins, that is, with the received givens of bodily existence and the created, creative responses we offer the world in return."
  "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander Toward Writing"
  
  
• Stephen Yenser:
  "It is quite simply a great pleasure to have this singular book. Well, I should say it is a great pleasure to have this quite complex book. Or, better, it is a complex pleasure to have this great volume. 'Simply' is a word that one wants to avoid in connection with Lowell, and this publication, more than a book, is not after all singular, however unique, but is rather most insistently a works, as we sometimes say with properly dubious grammar, and the better (which is also to say the worse) part of a life."
  Poetry in Review: Robert Lowell's Collected Poems
  
  
• John Hartley Williams:
  "The balance that used to sustain the walk of valid poetry between accessibility and obscurity has been set teetering by the demands of a culture that wants its lettuces ready-washed, and a band of ivory-tower-retreaters who cultivate their lettuces into such a state of perplexity nobody could wash them. What a wobble! And where into this vacillating mock-swordplay with meaning (in this awkward time of cataclysmic events and mental dullness) should we insert the fizzling work of Dylan Thomas?"
  "Dylan Lives!"
  
  
• Marianne Boruch:
  "In a very early poem, Robert Bly memorably defined the car as 'this solitude covered with iron,' and one can see in all this a peculiarly ironic and American way of meditation, our sitting, our za-zen requiring movement through space at incredible speeds. With danger. And brute force."
  "Poets in Cars"
  
  
• Andrew Hudgins:
  "The spiritual issue, the issue of faith, is much more difficult for me, fluid, and painful. I am, I think, an instinctive believer, but I balk at the intellectual level. No matter how much I want to make the leap I can’t do it. Sometimes, though, when I don’t think about it, I find that I’m thinking not like a believer, but as a believer."
  "A Conversation with Andrew Hudgins"
  
  
• Forrest Gander:
  
  It is in his attitude, his attitude toward words
  
  that George Oppen finds the ground for being and so
  
  creates poetry that is, for me, a source for a richer and more
  
  communal life. . ."
  
  "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen"
  
  
• W. S. Di Piero:
  "Many of us tell ourselves that if the race is to survive... we have to do what we're incapable of doing – doing without war. That knowledge, and the amassed facts of human waste and loss that go with it, could make for good, maybe great, poetry. But it would be poetry hot with ambiguity and the conflictedness of knowing that even when we propose answers, we know there are none, because there is no certitude. I can conceive of poetry that responds to the politically tribalized bloodshed of our planet's small, constant wars with a correspondingly blunt complexity, a poem that ignores neither the horror nor the thrill of killing."
  "Fat"
  
  
• David Baker:
  "I believe we put ourselves in the presence of poetic or figural language in order to experience or to represent our own and our species’ transcendental possibilities. Literary language, the language of trope and representation, is itself a form of ecstatic or transcendental exchange."
  "If: On Transit, Transcendence, and Trope"
  
  
• Dennis O’Driscoll:
  "... are there reasons, other than the obvious hopes of a sales boost or... an income boost and ego boost (those elemental, eternal but scarcely elevated incentives) -- why poets, a race whose mantras abound in reminders that vita is brevis and rosebuds need urgent gathering, are prepared to drop everything for the sake of reading their work in public?"
  "The Outnumbered Poet: Poets and Poetry Readings"
  
  
• Tony Hoagland:
  "The artistic life begins in instinct and moves towards calculation; or maybe, it begins in blind obsession and ends in self-possession. Or does it begin in play, and end in ambition? Or, some say, it begins in inspiration, and moves towards repetition. Whichever version you subscribe to, the loss of innocence is inevitable, and it is indeed a loss — but one that has its compensations."
  "Three Tenors: Glück, Hass, Pinsky, and the Deployment of Talent"
  
  
• Mark Halliday:
  "A poem, just by being a poem, says 'I am more significant than all your chatter, all your information, all your reports and articles, more significant even than all your stories, more important than any page of Crime and Punishment or Women in Love or Middlemarch — even, in a mysterious way, more important than each of these novels as a whole. You must gaze down into the well of me. You may never see to the bottom.'"
  "The Arrogance of Poetry"
  
  
• Edward Hirsch:
  "As a reader I am overwhelmed by a sense of providence when I discover an uncanny message in a bottle, when I encounter a poem of ruthless authenticity, the one that speaks to no one in particular, and therefore seems unexpectedly addressed to me."
  "'Exchanging Signals with the Planet Mars': Reading as Relationship"
  
  
• Dana Gioia:
  "Although conventional wisdom portrays the rise of electronic media and the relative decline of print as a disaster for all kinds of literature, this situation is largely beneficial for poetry."
  "Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture"
  
  
• Wesley McNair:
  "If you have doubts about the poem you have written, the kind of doubts that make you want to ask a friend what he or she thinks, don't bother. Trust the doubts."
  "Advice for Beginning Poets", from Wesley McNair's Mapping the Heart: Reflections on Place and Poetry
  
  
• Bill Christophersen on seven recent collections:
  "Generations of poets have followed [Wordsworth's] lead, elaborating and validating a poetry that filters personal experience rather than formalizes commonly held assumptions. But the strategy still invites legitimate questions."
  "The ' I ' and the Beholder: Negotiating the Shoals of Personal Narrative"
  
  
• Daisy Fried:
  "We are at the Highlander Inn, Manchester, NH. This is the first ever conference of state poet laureates. Poets laureate, I mean – everyone this weekend carefully says it that way."
  "Snapshots at a Conference"
  
  
• Tony Hoagland:
  "Meanness, the very thing which is unforgivable in human social life, in poetry is thrilling and valuable. Why?"
  "Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People"
  
  
• Carol Frost:
  "... in the end our sense of poetry – good and bad – comes from reading and, perhaps, remembering lines. What is their different character? What makes a line memorable?"
  "Passing Beauty"
  
  
• Robert Lacy:
  "Resurrection Cemetery is huge and well kept; the name might have delighted Henry. Visitors receive maps to guide them to the plots.
  "'I'm here to see the gravesite of the poet John Berryman,' I say..."
  "Threnody for Henry"