"[T]o convey the complexities of the human spirit was never [Raymond] Roussel’s intent—in fact, he prided himself on his artificiality and his avoidance of sentiment. The function of the people in the poem is to be looked at, not to shed light on human experience, not to inspire emotion on the part of the reader." Lisa Katz • Critical Flame

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"[R]eaders should be able to feel in poetry today a genuine and generous strangeness, a reaching out, a desire on the part of the poem itself (as odd as that may seem to say, it is how it feels to me when I read poems, that I am having an experience with the poem itself) to make contact and increase the actuality of imagined spaces." Matthew Zapruder in conversation with Dean Rader • SFGate

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"New Zealand writers have always suffered from what is sometimes called 'the tyranny of distance.' Rudyard Kipling called Invercargill, our southernmost city, 'the last lamppost in the world.' That distance was often felt in psychic ways—and perhaps still is—but the geographical fact was also pretty serious. Our poets had almost no readers outside New Zealand. How could their books, those solid things, find their way past the trade cartels and across the miles—twelve thousand of them—to the other side of the world?" Bill Manhire • World Literature Today

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"[Roy] Fisher writes about what’s sorely missing, or is often dodged, in our virtual world of speed and simultaneity—the full weight of time." Ange Mlinko • The Nation

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"[Twitter and Facebook] are unstable mediums. Like sculptures made of lard, they give the appearance of solidity or some sort of existence, but they do not exist. Or rather their existence is wildly contingent. More contingent, it seems (and I hope) than paper." Vanessa Place in conversation with Edmund Hardy • Intercapillary Space

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"When [Anne] Carson uses 'discandied,' a word Shakespeare turns to in Antony and Cleopatra to express the dissolution of sweetness that accompanies disillusionment, the reader feels a certain frisson of recognition comparable to the insights Carson seems to have had by tracing, in retrospection, the revealing postures and shadows in family photographs. Discandied: the word persists, like the proper name of her brother, Michael, a messenger without a message." Susan Stewart • The Nation

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"[Arthur] Rimbaud is more intransigent than ever, and in retrospect it seems inevitable that his next step as a poet had to be—silence. Or, to borrow Iris Murdoch’s vivid image, the electrical circuit of his poetry had become so overloaded that it fused and burned out." Martin Sorrell • Fortnightly Review

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"There is a turning away over the last few years from the more abstract experimental theory-driven 'projects' to poems that are more playful and/or emotionally invested." Dean Young • Fail Better

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"[E]ven the failed attempt to write a successful poem makes us aware of having the faculties, however atrophied or underdeveloped, for such an undertaking in the first place, and so keeps us in touch with our formal capacities for imagining alterity even if we can’t achieve it." Ben Lerner in conversation with Tao Lin • The Believer

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"I love finding the most awkward or unpoetic forms of expression and turning them into high lyricism. I’m a magpie for weird words. It’s a good way to help 'enlarge the English stock,' as Hopkins once said." Cathy Park Hong in conversation with Robyn Creswell • Paris Review

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"Given that [Edward] Thomas aspired to write poetry himself, it's hardly surprising that he viewed his work as frustrating drudgery, and that the need to keep churning it out exacerbated the depression to which he was prone. It took a poet—Robert Frost—to tell him that he 'was writing as good poetry as anybody alive, but in prose form where it did not declare itself.'" Adam Newey • Guardian

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"The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture." Lawrence Ferlinghetti in conversation with Jesse Tangen-Mills• Guernica

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"The poems are transparent (they need no mediation), yet they tantalise the reader with glimpses of an impenetrable self: so much yearning, so much debility; an eros that self-thwarts and self-finesses." Martin Amis on Philip Larkin • Financial Times

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"The image I had of New York when we first got here was of a giant switchboard. I know that’s old-fashioned and really dates me, but it was so incredibly social here. There were readings and parties and friends kept introducing you to other friends." Elaine Equi • Guernica

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"[W]hat if the category 'literature' includes not only textual production but also postproduction, not only creating texts but also doing things with them?" Sam Rowe • Full Stop

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"I get a bit weary of those articles about Prynne being the most neglected poet in England. He didn’t seek attention but he received plenty. I’m sure there are armies of poets who would kill for that kind of 'neglect.'" Geoff Nicholson on JH Prynne • LA Review of Books

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"The phrase 'unhealthy intersection' came from Conor Cruise O’Brien, who argued that art must maintain a neutral attitude to matters political and that artistic integrity can be threatened only by contamination with the body politic." John Fanning • Irish Times

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"What’s most refreshing about Grünbein’s takes on poetics is his skepticism of poetic theories, which comes off as frank and useful rather than cantankerous or partisan." Graham Foust • Ploughshares

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"If Irish poets have generally preferred Joyce’s Dublin to Yeats’s Byzantium, they have by and large chosen to work in the traditional meters and unfragmented syntax of the latter." Bill Coyle • New Criterion

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"Baudelaire is Houellebecq’s dark master in the lyrics and prose poems of The Art of Struggle." John Montague • TLS

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"Two apparently, or at least initially, unrelated texts, lineated in two columns to make up one poem, one text more conventionally introspective, the other more plotted, and grisly: the device isn't entirely new (see W. D. Snodgrass's 'After Experience Taught Me') but it's still unusual, and it comes with questions of its own." Stephen Burt • New Poetries

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"You can still rely on Myles for a reality check." Paul Muldoon and others on Flann O'Brien • Irish Times

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"The book weighs profit and loss in terms of past and present, social and political developments. But its emotional core is in 'private grief / or private fears,' its struggle to reconcile an inner life with external pressures." Fran Brearton on Leontia Flynn • Guardian

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"I invented a poet for my novel, a character called Liviu Campanu, but cut him out as he slowed the pace. I gave him a few lines of poetry, which I quite liked, so I built poems around them. Soon I found I had a small collection of his work, and he became my alter ego. I now write his poems and 'translate' them too. He's become quite popular—in fact a couple poetry critics said Campanu was the best thing about my recent book of poems, Jilted City. But he's a product—a by-product—of my novel, and he'll have his own book of poems soon." Patrick McGuinness • Booker Prize

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"Against those seemingly innovative writers who attempt to razor the traditional, subjective 'I' from their poems because they suspect it of being an illusory construct, [Robert] Duncan stands as a reminder of the primal, even anarchic, power of the lyric self. But his poems are not mere containers for expression either." Peter Campion • Poetry

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"Her very public brilliance may have worked against her over the years, for the Irish poetry world—and it is a strange old world of fortune-tellers and horse thieves—is suspicious of brilliance. It loves drunkenness, for example, or a visible impoverishment, but it hates the poet who seems to be in control all the time; especially if that self-control is attended by privileged social origins or ecstatically successful academic careers." Thomas McCarthy on Eavan Boland • Irish Examiner

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"Poets are often thought of as vague and wishy-washy, but, like scientists, they can't be. A poem can be about vagueness, but it has to be in precise relationship to vagueness if it's any good. I'm ridiculously analytical. Poetry, though, is an unsettlement." Lavinia Greenlaw • Guardian

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"[P]oetry . . . not only interrogat[es] the secrets of the present but also mourn[s] them and mak[es] sure they are part of the public record." Daniel Borzutzky in conversation with Kristin Dykstra • Bomb

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"The cultural receptiveness, the attention to history, the love poetry, the poetry of the overlooked and undervalued: all of these things exist simultaneously in his work, and the core of it all is a gift for empathy born out of a great capacity for love, 'the greatest reality.'" Peter Sirr on Pearse Hutchinson • Irish Times

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"[M]aybe their particular power, a power that can be almost scary, comes from their inability or refusal to find or accept a niche, to fit in. Certainly artists stand a better chance of becoming known and successful if they can be branded and labeled as part of a given movement, but [Raymond] Roussel was absolutely averse to all compromise." Mark Polizzotti in conversation with Mark Ford • The New Inquiry

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