"Rules in poetry can be broken, but that should be done with gusto, without looking back, the way D. drives his Ferrari on the highways of Europe: so much over the speed limit that radars cannot catch him in their photo frames." Vera Pavlova • Poetry

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"Recording my life is not my aim. I hope this produces literature, i.e. distance from the self and that no one is going to ask if one card is related to a biographical event – even if that happens sometimes." Eric Suchère in conversation with SJ Fowler • 3:AM

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"I recoil from Facebook and Twitter partly because they feel to me like the Flanders household from The Simpsons, where everything is 'okeley-dokeley!' — upbeat, positive, happy. Excited to eat this ramen! with accompanying photo, not Broke-ass and alone, vodka and blow for breakfast. " Sonya Chung • The Millions

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"The root of the problem is the desperate dogma that archaic Greece was an oral society. Here I share West’s exasperation. By the late sixth century there were something like 200,000 epic and lyric verses, and early works of prose, circulating in writing." Robert L Fowler • TLS

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"I like boring things. They make such lovely holes." Vanessa Place • Poetry

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"Katharine Tynan (1859-1931) is one of a number of rather unlucky writers whose lives span the 19th and 20th centuries, but whose work, overtaken by the tsunami of modernism, now seems far away, lying becalmed somewhere in the 1890s." Carol Rumens • Guardian

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"I am used to being uninhibited on the page; but the idea of staging my thoughts in a public space has created an anxiety of a whole different order." Gwyneth Lewis on writing for theatre • Guardian

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"Reading [Frank] O’Hara, I seem to see a shimmering pavement of a city somewhere, the silhouette of a man, sun warmth on the back of my neck, the air sharp and busy on my face, a sense that everything is just beginning, and anything is possible." Max Dunbar • 3:AM

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"Abaxial, Beringia, Contig, Deskewed, Epitopes, Ferrodoxin, Glycosylation, Homeotic, Inter-genome, Jejunum, Kinesin, Lensing, Metabolome, Nucleotide, Orthologue, Palaeointensity, Quantumteleportation, Remanence, Subtelomeric, Transposon, Urease, Vanilloid, Wnt, Younger Dryas, Zeolite." Colloquium on the relationship between metaphor and science • Jacket2

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"What’s evident immediately is that the qualities that have, so far, allowed Bishop to triumph over her American contemporaries (notably Lowell) have their counterparts in Larkin, who has, so far, triumphed over his English contemporaries (notably Hughes). Bishop’s characteristic modesty, meticulousness and, even, anti-Modernism are everywhere to be found in Larkin." Paul Muldoon • NYT

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"Reading the reviews that mistook genius is not simply cold comfort for critics whom taste passed by, or an exercise in antiquarian taste. The critics who got it wrong remind us that poets in whom we now see only virtues once seemed full of vices, and that, though we may value those vices differently, sometimes it is their presence that makes the virtues virtues." William Logan • New Criterion

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"In fact, while Redgrove was able (with some ingenuity) to garner book-jacket praise from his contemporaries, it was far from universal. That lack of critical bite saw him survive many mauling." Graeme Richardson • TLS

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"Published and printed in Ireland, edited by two Irish people, it nonetheless billed itself as 'A Magazine of International Poetry': the desire was present from the outset to provide a platform for the best of Irish work alongside the best from the UK, US, Australia as well as work in translation." Justin Quinn and David Wheatley introduce Metre • Metre

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"Trains feature prominently, as do borders, journeys, landscape, memories, and solitude." Teju Cole on WG Sebald's poetry • New Yorker

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"And the corn fields today? Buried, said Margraff Turley, under a multi-storey car park." Alison Flood on Keats • Guardian

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"The map of twentieth-century Italian poetry is marked by many schools (Crepuscularism, Futurism, Hermeticism, Neorealism, Neoavant-gardism), and Brock’s introduction to the anthology describes the complicated, often overlapping contours of this map deftly. More fascinating, however, is the way the poems collected here embody this constantly shifting intersection of various linguistic and political energies—and not simply because all the great Italian moderns are represented, along with a variety of lesser-known but equally fascinating poets, some of whom write in dialect, some of whom have only recently entered middle age." James Longenbach • The Nation

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"I like that phrase of Wallace Stevens: ‘The poem is the cry of its occasion’.” Paul Durcan • Irish Times

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"The series on the work of the painter Veronica Bolay stands out and confirms Paul Durcan’s oeuvre as a poetry of encounter, of sidelong glances and exuberant strangeness." Paul Perry • Irish Times

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"He denounced the 'shouting mediocrity' of three-quarters of the poems that he published in an early private booklet, dismissing the verses as 'hopeless old friends whom you know will never get a job.'" Michiko Kakutani • NYT

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"The poem works like a heliotropic vine trained to a post--as we move our eyes downward through the poem, the poem moves upward into the air to arrive at a surprise, here 'breath’s flaked edges.' Though hard to know exactly what this means, it feels like a release from the lines that lead us to this moment, suggesting decay as much as freedom." Peter O'Leary on Gustaf Sobin • The Cultural Society

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"His has been a kind of permanent exile, dictated by temperament." Dwight Garner on Jack Gilbert • NYT

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"[T]he end product of a published [George] Oppen poem often seems unfinished, a kind of draft, as Oppen frequently re-used titles, images and lines of poems." Eric Hoffman • Culture Society

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"If most of American culture is kitsch, as [Linh] Dinh seems to believe—Vietnamese culture too—one naturally wonders what he makes of poetry (and 'poetry culture'). His title poem suggests an answer: 'As soon as I got off the boat, I stepped on a slice of cheese. / The cheese is cheesier here, the non-cheese also cheesier.'" Keith Tuma • Chicago Review

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"Had he lived, it seems likely that [Charles Donnelly's] political internationalism would have evolved, as his comparison of the ordinary magnificence of the Spanish people with those of Achill Island seems to suggest, into a poet’s rather than an activist’s vision of human universality. 'It’s two years since I’ve written verse,' he wrote to Cecil Salkeld two days before leaving for Spain, 'and here I am now writing every day. I only wish I hadn’t wasted the last two years.'" Harry Clifton • Irish Times

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"What [Marjorie] Perloff does with twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry has its model in what Susan Howe does with Dickinson and Yeats: reframing, reduplication, stenciling, permutation, parody, leaving behind a differently structured archive. The temptation is to condense her message even more radically, thus: 'All current poetry is concrete poetry.' By other means? By all means." Haun Saussy • Lana Turner

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"Beginning with the so-called 'cultural turn' of the humanities in the 1970s, the academy has gradually shifted its attention from interpretive criticism, or analysis of the formal and aesthetic qualities of literary texts, to historicized readings of the social and cultural contexts of their production." Stephen Ross • Oxonian Review

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"Publishing was Keith Waldrop’s initiative. He wanted a poetry magazine and, as we were penniless graduate students, decided the only way was to print it ourselves. The early 60s happened to be the moment when print shops all over the country dumped their letterpresses… It took a little while to learn to print, but we did." Mathew Timmons on Burning Deck • Molussus

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"Maintained by writers such as John Milton and Ben Jonson, commonplace books were personal notebooks teeming with aphorisms, quotations, and annotations. In a world without Wikipedia, the commonplace book was especially handy for argumentation, for it was a reservoir of useful wisdom that could be memorized and deployed in rhetoric and composition." Shaj Mathew • The Millions

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"Like pretty much all collections, Animal Eye doesn’t always live up to its best moments. (Not coincidentally, most poetry books also feel too long.)" Jonathan Farmer on Paisley Rekdal • Slate

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"Just as his shapes are defined by formal qualities—line and color—so her poems are formally defined by syntax, line, and internal rhyme." Ellen Davis on Laura Kasischke • Harvard Review

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