"For this is not america, but touristic Vienna, where the Wienfluss flows into the Donaukanal. But ‘nevermind, they’ll return’, those children--who and how many will they be when they do?--real or unreal, whether they too have travelled to america, or simply come here to look for it." Evan Jones on Helen Tookey • New Poetries

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"[W]ith the advent of the web and the rise of revisionist ideas of what constitutes art (for example, Ubu proposing that modernist ephemera might be more important than the modernists’ 'primary' works), somehow that funny idea of the avant-garde seems appropriate for today. Likewise, the web is such a new frontier that there’s this crazy utopian sense of 'future' again, which is not so different from the original avant-gardists’." Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation with Nadja Romain • Tank

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"I took long walks that multiplied my body into companionable parts." Fanny Howe • Poetry

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"The boom was resolutely unpoetic, its hard-faced greed posing an impossible challenge to the lyricism that is the first resort of Irish writing." Fintan O'Toole • Irish Times

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"Hers is so charged with a depth of sensuous associations that it feels raw and unconscious, dreamlike and primeval, exciting precisely because you can pleasantly think it over endlessly without ever making sense of it or having it lose its mystery." Adam Plunkett on Katherine Larson and Michael Dickman • Bookforum

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"I had a sculpture unveiled at the Bury Art Museum earlier this year; and in the fall, when the show it was part of is over, it will be installed in the central transit station in Bury, Lancashire [England]. It’s a giant neon sign. Letters are about the size of the letters that are in the outfield on the scoreboard. And it says, in three lines, 'POETRY / HAS BEEN BURY BURY / GOOD TO ME.'" Ron Silliman in conversation with Jim Behrle • Poetry

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"[Rabindranath Tagore] is quite as good as Yeats on the way that the imagination can entrap the soul before ever managing to liberate it; and he would agree with Yeats that nationalist enthusiasm can be one kind of such poisonous fantasy. 'The idea of the Nation is one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented,' Tagore told his American lecture audience." Seamus Perry • TLS

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"Retelling a great myth is like performing a famous piece of music: between faithfulness to the familiar score and personal interpretation of it lie many risks and choices. Between the worldview of a Norse skald, or poet, and that of a writer ten or fifteen centuries later, the scope for risks and choices is immense." Ursula K Le Guin on Ragnarök • Literary Review

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"Lyric’s capacity to remake personhood is thus founded on the reader’s experience—the experience of overhearing. But note: this experience is fictional. We do not actually overhear anyone. We are actually reading an artfully composed artifact, and we know this. But we pretend we overhear, and our experience of the poem is framed by this pretense." Michael Clune, Paul Grimstad, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Aaron Kunin, and Geoffrey G. O’Brien respond to Oren Izenberg • nonsite.org

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"Sometimes we live as if we know more about the experiences we don't have than about the experiences we do." Adam Phillips on Philip Larkin • The Threepenny Review

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"It is typical of [Raymond] Roussel’s idiosyncratic approach, at once revolutionary and old-fashioned, that he would develop this idea, conceptually so in tune with the avant-garde developments of his own period, by grafting it onto a canonic rootstock to create a hybrid form, a timeless allegory of creative power." Joshua Lustig • Open Letters Monthly

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"I hate the dumbing down of poetry, the lowering of the bar until, as both revered teachers and friends of mine Donald Justice and Simic commented, it is almost impossible for young people to tell the difference between a good and a bad poem, since for decades it has been fashionable to write in such a manner--obscurity for obscurity's sake is how I would describe it--that makes it virtually impossible to tell whether you have any talent, have anything very interesting to say, etc." Franz Wright in conversation with Anis Shivani • Huffington Post

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"My first impulse is to say, 'Enjoy Rae Armantrout now in cool mint flavor!' Ok, seriously, one thing to keep in mind is that there may be a number of voices in my poems. These voices may or may not represent my beliefs. Consider the possibility that some of the voices may be unreliable or deliberately 'wrong.' What does that do to your reading experience?" Rae Armantrout • Smartish Pace

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"I think the risk lies at a very human level. You start to work with somebody because there is a personal interest in exploring what that person is doing and a curiosity to see what will happen. It’s a bit like alchemy for me and the risk is that you never know in advance where this will lead you: if you have an explosion, will you end up completely blackened in soot, or will you have created gold?" Maja Jantar in conversation with Oana Avasilichioaei • Jacket2

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"[Arthur Rimbaud] is moving at such an imaginative pace and with such verve. He is in a kind of fever, helplessly in the grip of whatever forces him to lay these rapturous words down. When he writes in the first person, he seems to have absorbed everything into himself. At other times he seems to be both himself and many others all at once." Michael Glover on John Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud • Independent

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"These poems had escaped the museum of literature. Many of those that remain are like charcoal smudges on a nearly completed portrait, or the hint of a form emerging in repeated sketches of a single idea. Scrawled mishaps." Emily Warn • Poetry

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"[I]n pitting the ballad tradition against the Modernists, [Les] Murray was calling on Australian poetry to follow its own native course and foster its own native values, including an optimistic expansiveness that turned its back on both the “narrow ways” of the old Mother Country and the cramped despair of the Modernists, and a no-nonsense egalitarianism, suspicious of all pretensions, including intellectual pretensions. (Of the three rallying cries of modern democratic revolutions, equality has always had more resonance in Australia than liberty.)" JM Coetzee • NYRB

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"[E]ven when [Mihalis] Katsaros expressed irony and disappointment, he was always clear about anticipating what is and what is not yet; in the sense that utopias express unfulfilled hopes, his vision was utopian. He was solemn and sardonic, always looking ahead while he kept in mind the events of the present and past. ‘Take water with you,’ he writes. ‘Our future will be dry.’ At least he could imagine a future even as he saw it in its darkest moments." Natalie Bakopoulos • Granta

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"I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately—in order to endure, in order not to feel—but it has killed V. . . . I have deliberately killed my senses—I have deliberately died—in order to go on with the outward form of living—This I did in 1915." James Longenbach on TS Eliot • The Nation

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"The question that it raises, though, is not 'where are the women?' but 'what’s new?'" Jeremy Noel-Tod on the Forward Prize • Telegraph

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"I don’t think it is a good idea for a poet to turn into a philosopher. I like philosophers like I like my uncles. I will let them buy me lunch. But that is about it." Ilya Kaminsky in conversation with SJ Fowler • 3:AM

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"[Programming] techniques share a likeness to musical composition. It gives writers a new kind of control over aspects in writing we don’t often think about, such as randomness, over-repetition, rates of change, dissonance (obfuscation), melody (narrative). Programming becomes useful when an artist wants to repeat patterns and/or change patterns over frequencies." Darby Larson • HTML Giant

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"The language knots, bulges, scintillates. Everywhere organic matter is being pressed to coal, or coal to diamonds." Michael Hofmann on Les Murray • Poetry

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"Lyric poets, who may be as aware as any novelist of what is happening in society, must condense social questions into personal ones and must transform written language by giving it rhythmic breath and musical cadence." Helen Vendler on Wislawa Szymborska and Tomas Tranströmer • NYRB

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"Tranströmer's poems often work by bringing together a series of contrasts – light and dark, self and other, sleep and wakefulness – and arranging them so as to open up huge areas of experience within short lyric poems." Paul Batchelor • Guardian

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"There's a voice in the poem that says: 'We have no history. / Nothing has passed between us. // A hundred years pass like this.' I take this to mean that we can have it both ways: work, and no work. Time passes, and leaves behind its texts and ditches and references, all waiting to be lost and perhaps found again. A poem is a place of amusement and musing; it really is a circus, a dear old circus, after all." Don Share on Kate Kilalea • New Poetries

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"All his strengths and weaknesses are evident in this era-defining lament, a turning point in his own development: the drama, the lyric thrust, exact and meaningful description, casual insights; but also the obtrusive wisecrack, the too obvious Lowell note, the apparent lack of direction. The lack of direction, though, is a function of his exile theme, the sobering thought that some things stay the same wherever you go." Derek Mahon on Joseph Brodsky • Literary Review

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"[I]t is a writing imbued with celebration, ablaze with enthusiasm for the future, embracing this moment as one pregnant with possibility. This joy is evident in the writing itself, in which there are moments of unanticipated beauty—some grammatical, others structural, many philosophical: the wonderful rhythms of repetition, the spectacle of the mundane reframed as literature, a reorientation to the poetics of time, and fresh perspectives on readerliness, to name just a few. And then there's emotion: yes, emotion. But far from being coercive or persuasive, this writing delivers emotion obliquely and unpredictably, with sentiments expressed as a result of the writing process rather than by authorial intention." Kenneth Goldsmith • Chronicle Review

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"These two volumes detail Eliot’s struggle to find a career and to shoulder his way into the London literary world, a school of sharks where writers reviewed their friends and publishers reviewed their authors." William Logan on TS Eliot • NYT

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"[Joshua] Corey’s 'fallible poem[s]' (an honest phrase) approach the asymptote of truth but, like all poetry and all life, fail to reach it. We are left with an angel in one hand and an ass in the other, braying Bottom waking up from a dream that doesn’t give any clear sense of what to make of past or future. We are left with a legacy of others’ words and a traditional form that is stretched into new shapes. Nora Delaney • Critical Flame

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"The 'Recourse' sketches a pursuit of love—which is, before anything, the continuation of self by other means—that refuses to yield up 'wisdom' and 'generosity,' those accredited tokens of poetic worth. It is selfish, slippery, needy, resolutely non-portable, and all the better for it." Nicholas Liu on Jee Leong Koh • QLRS

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