"Can’t Whitman be allowed to evolve? Mustn’t he? Isn’t harboring a fatal fear of sounding like oneself the mark of any great poet?" Anton Vander Zee • Agni

---

"We have loved Polish poets for their moral glamour more than we have appreciated the poetry itself." Joanne Mackowski • Contemporary Poetry Review

---

"'A Lament for Our Lady's Shrine at Walsingham' is not a narrative poem, except in glimpses of older, happier scenes. Their recollection underlines the sharp contrast with the present. The ballad works primarily by antithesis: tall, glittering towers now lying level with the ground, toads and serpents instead of pilgrims (palmers), nights instead of days, holy deeds turned to outrages (despites), hell instead of heaven." Carol Rumens • Guardian

---

"When the police showed up at the party—we had cars up and down the street for three miles—they saw Allen and asked for his autograph: the cops were fans. I mean, is this a great world or what?" Remembering Allen Ginsberg • Guardian

---

"He says while he was closely associated with Hamilton and the Review, he was never really in thrall to its 'minor cult of the short poem.' But he was interested in was how short poems 'could become a sort of necklace.'" Nicholas Wroe on David Harsent • Guardian

---

"In general, grammatical mistakes—whether intentional or accidental—are tolerated far less than unfounded facts." Michael H Miller • New York Observer

---

"Though she graduated from Vassar, Bishop was a haphazard and cruelly inventive minder of stops. ('Punctuation is my Waterloo,' she wrote glumly.)" William Logan • New York Times

---

"She was, in the highest sense of the word, a prosaic poet, who like the supreme prose masters—Flaubert, James, Nabokov—could create a verbal fabric so fine that nothing was lost to it. Never trying to be merely modern, she succeeded in becoming perpetually immediate and contemporary." Dana Gioia on Bishop • Wall Street Journal

---

"For Duncan, English department literature was the ossification of a living, vital recording impulse in the same way that the church was the ossification of a living, vital religious impulse." Ange Mlinko • The Nation

---

"Compared to the other arts, poets spend most of their time scratching their heads in the dark." Charles Simic • NYRB

---

"Out of fear of self-exoticization, whole lexicons, common and proper nouns, landscapes, backroads, and trysts go unrecorded. They vanish." Patrick Rosal on Joel Toledo • Galatea Resurrects

---

"And just as the onus on the critic has lightened, so the careful research of a volume such as Meeting the British (1997), or the opaque allusion of Madoc (1990) is demystified, and replaced, in some of Maggot's long poems, by a visible Wikipedia trail. Yet while the feat of gathering and connecting historical personages such as the Union General William Sherman and the circus manager and entrepreneur Adam Forepaugh might now seem hollow, 'The Side Project' manages to perform an imaginative and contextual triumph." Sarah Bennett on Paul Muldoon • Tower Poetry

---

"Young poets still pursue intricately ambivalent answers. But poets can also answer 'yes' or 'no.'" Stephen Burt • Boston Review

---

"Within every story another story is hidden, autonomous and unfolding though scarcely noticed except now and then, inadvertently, when, just as with a slip of the tongue a woman exposes a bit of the turbulent life under way in her unconscious mind, a rat scurries through an open window with a doll’s head in its mouth, or a man shouts a couplet from a passing bus ('o queens of urbanity, kings of the crush / let’s sing of convenience, importance, and plush')." Lyn Hejinian • Conjunctions

---

"If Carl hits it big as an MC, he can look forward to becoming rich and famous, with an audience of millions of passionate fans. If he succeeds as a poet, he can look forward to—tenure." Adam Kirsch • Poetry

---

"Consider Issa’s haiku from an economic perspective, as Issa himself did. Instead of writing a long-winded economics article about silkworms and silk, Issa summed up his points in 17 syllables." Stephen T. Ziliak (pdf)

---

"The poems, then, were an expression of another kind of political power: what [Robert] Darnton calls 'the undefined but undeniably influential authority known as the "public voice."'" Emily Parker • The New Republic

---

"[Seamus] Heaney brings together legacies he has inherited both from previous great poets in his circle, and also from the community in his district." Anthony Moore • Contemporary Poetry Review

---

"[T]he land is fast becoming more rebuke than respite." Patricia Smith, Todd Boss, CD Wright and Frances McCue in conversation with Jeremy Richards • Poetry

---

"[W]hat can poems, what can art, do that a book of advice, a long trip, or a chat with a friend, cannot?" Stephen Burt on Carl Dennis • The New Republic

---

"The translations are of consistently high quality—by which I mean that not only do the poems work in English, but they adhere closely to the originals in tone, content, and format." Niloufar Talebi on Iranian poetry • Harvard Review

---

"[T]he act of singing invective that satirizes feared public figures has an immediate impact that cannot be cannot be explained in terms of language, for learning to laugh at one’s oppressor is a key part of unlearning fear." Elliott Colla • Jadaliyya

---

"The poets who come to mind while I’m reading Hayes’s best work share his antic sense of situation and his edgy decency: Tony Hoagland, for example, or Paul Beatty. They don’t fritter the reader’s attention with extra examples of whatever, and when Hayes is on point, neither does he." Jordan Davis on Terrance Hayes • Constant Critic

---

"Chiefly, by exercising in play and delight the channels we rely on for communication and meaning, it keeps them pure." Andrew Singer on Glyn Maxwell • Open Letters Monthly

---

"Writing about [David] Jones in 1974, as the forests of Vietnam burned, Seamus Heaney compared the Celtic fragments of The Sleeping Lord to 'the jungle's complaint to the napalm.'" David Wheatley • New Statesman

---

"People sometimes ask me which recent books of poetry I enjoyed reading, and I reply, with embarrassment, that because reading poetry books is my job, I don’t often think of them in terms of how enjoyable they are; I think of them as “interesting” or “not interesting.” Pathetic, I know. But I not only found this book interesting, I enjoyed it." Joel Brouwer • Poetry

---

"Despite Skoog’s interest in people from all walks of life, he is really writing to other poets." Henry Hughes • Harvard Review

---

"[C]all all you want, baby, because nobody's home." Vanessa Place • Lana Turner

---