"Such is the danger of first books, and the first poems therein: high expectations. Onward John Beer! Leave these barren fields, cropped and rotated to extinction. There are verdancies ahead that you and we have yet undreamt of. I can see a forest for Some Trees." Bruce Bogher • The Claudius App

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"1. He offers an alternative to ethnic writing that is conceptual, innovative, and quietly defiant. 2. His view of nature is testing but indispensable. 3. He has un-Whited-Out the poetry we got. 4. His use of language exposes the inherent prejudices and cover-ups that have become embedded in it over time." John Yau on Ed Roberson • Poetry

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"Remember Nabokov’s butterflies, Larkin’s jazz, Benjamin’s postcards: have a side interest to keep you fresh for the other thing. Know when to let go." David Wheatley • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"We read to find a place to dwell on, and even in, for a time; it’s of no country I know. There are many strangers in it, including myself." David Ferry in conversation with Tess Taylor • Poetry

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"[Illuminations] is full of invocations to eerie, invented entities, strange beings inhabiting a utopia or possibly a dystopia. It feels as if it is set in the future. In any event it is unmistakably a book about the 'new'. Rimbaud speaks of 'the new harmony', 'the new men' and 'the new love'. The poet is often describing in precise detail a cityscape—but which city? London? Amsterdam?" Edmund White • TLS

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"The slogan which all the Arab uprisings that we are witnessing now used—all of them—is derived from a poem by a late Tunisian poet. Arabic people are shouting everywhere, 'the people want the collapse of the regime,' and al Shabi wrote, 'If people want life, destiny will have to obey.' In Arabic, the wording of both is very similar. Even the main slogan of the revolution is linked to early 20th century poetry." Rachael Allen • Granta

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"[P]oetry pamphlets invite us to be affected by how they look and feel. They want to be collected as much as read; there will be fewer poems for your pound, but these are likely to be presented distinctively, even eccentrically." John Greening • TLS

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"[Kay Ryan] was, and wished ever to be, 'an outsider.' Besides, she has never taken (or even taught!) a creative writing class. Those who busy themselves with such things are, she notes in all caps, 'THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.'” Rick Joines • Contemporary Poetry Review

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Two prose pieces by Elaine Bleakney and Rachel Zucker • At Length

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"If Eliot and Celan responded to historical trauma by breaking their mirrors, [Wing Tek] Lum has built something more surgical and compact, like a knife." Ken Chen • NYFA

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"[F]or someone’s poetry to 'be in fashion' means that it’s somehow more about 'keeping up with appearances.'” Don Share • Harriet / Poetry Foundation

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"Stopping everything is something. Stopping everything and stopping all of that thing is something. Stopping everything and then doing nothing in stopping everything is something." Ben Greenman • McSweeney's

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"I like limiting things. I think it describes a certain way of working—a certain way that a lot of people are working today. It gives a name to a lot of different gestures." Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation with Paul Legault • Poets.org

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"Writing with or about metaphors is not dancing with the stars, but dancing with asterisks—pointers to the figurative understructure of our supposedly literal language. The more we stay sensitive to that, the better we dance." Carlin Romano • Chronicle of Higher Education

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"[Timothy] Donnelly thus sets in motion (in slo-mo) a 21st-century purgatory of verbal simulation." Daniel Tiffany • LARB

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"[Y]ou're going to have to try and see clearly through the murk, even for the part you've agreed to take on. An obscure life, without anything dazzling, without any brilliant colors, a terrible difficulty to grasp the real." Pierre Reverdy, trans. Peter Boyle • Jubilat

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"You gotta look beyond, beyond the border to understand the history of your country." CS Giscombe in conversation with Adam Fagin • Eleven Eleven

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"I think I’m actually more naturally a writer of sentences than a writer of poems, whatever that means. I could never have a style that was not made up of complete sentences. I’m resistant to styles that are fragmentary at the level of the sentence. Fragmentary at the level of thought or of stanza I love because that can seem true to the patterns of thought, but fragmentary at the level of the sentence I just can’t read." Dan Chiasson in conversation with Gibson Fay LeBlanc • Guernica

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"'Make it new' is Pound's best-known injunction, not, as it is sometimes taken to be, an exhortation to concentrate on the modern, but instead to rediscover the past so it can speak to the present. 'All ages,' he wrote, 'are contemporaneous.'" Helen Carr • New Statesman

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"Poet’s Guide to Britain (2010), a tie-in for a BBC television series, offered a poetic map of the territory that finds room for first-collection debutantes but none for Geoffrey Hill and Basil Bunting. Where [Paul] Farley and [Michael] Symmons Roberts are concerned, amnesia is the message rather than the medium: the edgelands are delivered to us pre-forgotten, falling outside traditional categories of habitation, attachment and nostalgia." David Wheatley • Tower Poetry

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"The work is phenomenal. If Joyce really did think that Dublin could be reconstructed from Ulysses, Mahon’s New Collected Poems will similarly provide time-capsule proof of late-20th- and early-21st-century transatlantic life." Gerald Dawe on Derek Mahon's New Collected Poems • Irish Times

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"Fisher’s poetry is experimental, but not in the American way." Daisy Fried • Poetry

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"The Arts Council for three years in the 1970s provided free subscriptions for a dozen literary magazines to 600 public libraries: the word was as widely proclaimed as possible. Our library culture was at the heart of a vision of democratic artistic access." Michael Schmidt considers the 200th issue of PN Review • PN Review

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"There is no overarching vision, [Christian] Hawkey’s poem suggests, only those moments when the 'ant-light' briefly clears the glass we look through. And even that’s not right: 'Never through,' we read, 'but around.'” Marjorie Perloff • LARB

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"You can more or less try and repeat the poet’s evocations. But can you render one’s immersion in idiolect and regional intonations? To do so, you have to be sensitive to all the nuances, subtleties and colorings of your own language. And you have to invent the poem you translate anew so that it stands' in your own speech." Jacek Gutorow • Poetry International

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"The insistence on calling the work a novel does achieve the assumption of a multifarious imaginary world that counteracts the lyric I‘s hyperreality; still, one cannot help but think of the book as an entry into Baudelaire’s ambitions for the prose poem: that it be 'musical but without rhythm or rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movement of our consciences.'” Donna Stonecipher • The Quarterly Conversation

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"[T]ranslation acts as a bridge between two different two poetic traditions. What may be permissible in one tradition may be eschewed in another, at least until translation happens. Perhaps it may be better to say that every translation enlarges the possibilities of the target language’s poetic tradition." José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes in conversation with Angela Narciso Torres • Rhino

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"[A] translation (of anything) is good or bad in proportion to the skill with which the translator is able to find equivalents for the significant qualities of the original, and this is exactly as true for the translation of poetry as it is for the translation of an insurance document." DM Black • Poetry London

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"I like the idea of them side by side in the chorus, all desperate for the solo. Maybe the orchestra is made up of their correlative objects then—all the pistillate shivs and frockcoats, imaginary mountains, old socks, stillborns and kidnappees, the Holy Prepuce." JT Welsch in conversation with Michael Egan • Holdfire

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"Lamenting the death of a language and a tradition, the death that had begun in Ireland with the arrival of Spenser and Bryskett, Kinsella had asked himself a difficult and a liberating question, a question that haunts anyone who lives in this landscape now, or writes about it." Colm Toibin on Thomas Kinsella • Irish Times

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"There were rumors that [JH] Prynne held parties in his chambers at Caius where poetry would be debated late into the night and deep existential topics would be broached, like which books of poetry it was acceptable to roll joints on (Pope, no; Keats, yes)." Emily Witt • Poetry / n+1

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