"[E]ight times out of ten, an erasure of a poem, made by the author of that poem, will be better than the original poem. It is sometimes called revision, but of course you cannot actually read the original poem, you can only look at the words." Mary Ruefle • Quarter After Eight

---

"Judge: Who said you were a poet? Who assigned you that rank? Brodsky: No one. (Nonconfrontational.) Who assigned me to the human race?" Michael Scammell • The New Republic

---

"He denies that a sensibility like [Frank] O’Hara’s is a mere 'form of exquisite sensibility,' 'but rather a way of judging and sorting the world,' a claim that allows him to refer to 'the philosophy of O’Hara’s fun' and to claim that it contributes 'rationally to a judgment of the world.' Robert Pippin on Oren Izenberg • Nonsite

---

"I want to provoke discussion of what I see as the problem that many of the best younger literary critics seem driven to prefer the display of intelligence to the testing of the validity of the ideas used for that display. Our critics move very quickly through vast ranges of material. This takes a great deal of intelligence. But it also risks wasting that intelligence because the work tends to override the texts’ capacities to make themselves heard on what might be considered something close to their own terms. Such work visibly claims more than it can establish, as if one aspect of the process were to make risk itself a mark of distinction for criticism, like Lowell’s poet-skier." Charles Altieri • Nonsite

---

"Far from pressing knowledge on an outsider, [he] asks the (British, Irish) reader to accept an insider's responsibility." Fiona Sampson on Tom Paulin • Independent

---

"Today's need to classify a poem as either political or not is regressive; it separates poetry from the language we use every day, the language that tips us towards or hold us back from the kinds of conflict that become full-fledged battles, ignoring the fact that language is always political." Lytton Smith • LARB

---

"It is the poetical sublime enunciating pure fact." Peter Riley on Denise Riley • Fortnightly Review

---

"I was not trying to communicate with anyone, and I was not trying to communicate with myself. In fact, I seemed actively to be trying to avoid some sort of conversation with myself by endlessly changing the subject. And tellingly, when I couldn’t write, I could only remember the idea or attitude of the poetry I wanted to write, and this was, loosely speaking, indirect or tongue-in-cheek. So there it was: poetry, the most intimately personal form of writing, and I couldn’t even think in terms of what I meant any more. An appreciation of post-modern Northern Irish poetry had left me supposing it wasn’t supposed to mean anything or be in touch with anything." Leontia Flynn • Edinburgh Review

---

"Yet however sophisticated and ethical is [Peter] Gizzi’s disavowal of self ('not autobiographical but autographical,' he describes his aim in the 2008 anthology Lyric Postmodernisms), in this volume Gizzi’s references and word music often are not individual or eccentric enough to escape collapsing back into poetic doxa." Christopher Schmidt • Boston Review

---

"[A]rguably [Don] Paterson's most ambitious poem to date, 'The White Lie,' [t]his philosophical treatise expounds--just as this Selected Poems reveals--what he has long seen as poetry's transformative responsibility, as the world we think we know is 'reconsumed in its estranging fire.'" Ben Wilkinson • Guardian

---

"A vigorous and welcome step outside of the easy-going, 'well crafted' and 'accessible' versification that distinguishes contemporary British poetry at the moment." Andy Brown on Tom Paulin and Paul Farley • Stride

---

"One day, I hope to live in a country I haven’t imagined yet." Bhanu Kapil in conversation with Rowland Saifi • HTMLGIANT

---

"I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going." Charles Simic • NYRB

---

"These often messy lives were visionary, in terms of forging a counter-poetics to attenuated and restrictive doldrums. It’s like Ezra Pound. You can’t get around the Cantos—infuriated as you might feel at times—and why would you want to? You can go beyond him, possibly, or through him." Anne Waldman in conversation with Frances Richard • Bomb

---

"Virtue is never transmitted. When I journeyed across America, 15 years ago, making a nuisance of myself with the figures of my early reading, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, I missed Gary Snyder. Thanksgiving was approaching and he didn’t want to disturb a family gathering. The writers I met, apart from Burroughs in his red clapboard Kansas bungalow, were in rooms in cities. They had answered too many questions, spent too many years in the echo chamber of old recordings. Snyder’s engagement was much more direct." Iain Sinclair on Gary Snyder • LRB

---

"Poem by poem, this is to say, what RF Langley presents are quite singular linguistic worlds in which quite different ways emerge of answering the poet’s abiding questions." David Herd • Edinburgh Review

---

"The problem, for Berlant, is the suburban fantasy 'of the endless weekend,' the 'consumer’s happy circulation in familiarity,' and the 'privilege of being bored with life' ... As a reading of Ashbery this might be right, but as an account of Marx, it isn’t. For Marx, of course, the problem is the privilege of private property, not the 'privilege of being bored.'" Todd Cronan on affect • Nonsite

---

"This volume’s title, like that of his earlier Adaptations (2006), makes clear that a poem of Rilke’s or Pushkin’s is for Mahon a resource to be mined by a later poet, with which to build another poem without worrying about the fallacy of perfect translation." George Potts on Derek Mahon • Literateur

---

"A translation is an x-ray, not a xerox. A poet translator is a xenophiliac." Willis Barnstone • Poets.org

---

"Talking too much about yourself is like wearing your clothes inside out." Anna Kamienksa, trans. Clare Cavanagh • Poetry

---

“Making love to an old man is like / Making love to a limp cornstalk blackened by fungus.” Eliza Griswold on Afghan women poets • NYT

---

"The poet bloggers I once thought I knew were but status updates of their former selves. They were no longer espousing on the great poetic issues of our time; instead, they were posting pictures of food porn!" Craig Santos Perez • Poetry

---

"It is the familiar suddenly perceived, and the sharpness of that perception, found somehow in language, that characterises Furious Resonance. Jones’s eye, pressed against the glass, is a keen one." John North on Terry Jones • Manchester Review

---

"While poetry remains economically insignificant (Andrew Crozier compared it to hill farming), the award structure openly mimics commercialism. Like the festivals, it is a promotional machine which creates a star system in order to market a few products as exceptional." Peter Riley • Fortnightly Review

---

"She offers a forensic essay—an assay, an attempt, a testing; it is a sifting of evidence, drawn from a vast cultural inheritance here mobilized with a sorrowing wit." Maureen N McLane • Poetry

---

"A virtual academy of one, she dramatizes the whole 'p' crowd of our troubles: personal, political, psychological, philological, phenomenological, philosophical." Cal Bedient on Jorie Graham • LARB

---

"The translations work forcefully, and it’s likely that [Jaan] Kaplinski’s pellucid style lends itself particularly well to translation, though the book only really seems to get going from The Wandering Border onwards." Peter Sirr • Poetry Ireland

---

"In the current climate, with thousands of poets jostling for their place in the sun, a tepid tolerance rules." Marjorie Perloff • Boston Review

---

"I believe, honestly, that the poet has an intuitive grasp of the language's history.' Cesar Vallejo, trans. Kent Johnson • The Claudius App

---

"Al Alvarez does not convince us, or even really set out to convince us that [Ted] Hughes’s poem is actually better than [Philip] Larkin’s, merely that its attitudes and its manner are to be preferred." William Wooten • TLS

---

"Q: How do you define home? A: Wherever the stove is." Mark Strand in conversation with Nathalie Handal • Guernica

---