"Why are there two reviews of Wiman's Mandelstam?" Daniel E. Pritchard • Critical Flame

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"Is he embracing political quietism or criticising artistic self indulgence?" David Cooke on Derek Mahon • B O D Y

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"Against a backdrop of polarisation in British poetry between an aging avant-garde and a conservative mainstream, Riviere’s formless circumlocutions at least have the virtues of eccentricity and gaucheness, two qualities that are relatively rare in major label contemporary verse." Alex Niven and Stephen Ross • Oxonian Review

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"Poetry, like opera (my other artful love), frequently reminds us of its construction, of its staging. This characteristic, to me, makes its successes that much more gripping." Gabe Fried introduces Stefanie Wortman • Boston Review

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"While serving time and the working life are enshrined in [Dennis O'Driscoll's] poetry and he sang the praises of the “labour saving devices”, there was a spiritual integrity to his writing; a lyrical tenderness in Nocturne and Roads Not Taken. To many fellow poets he was a much-loved mentor, as well as being one of poetry’s true champions and certainly its most prodigious archivist." Gerard Smyth • Irish Times

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"On a recent morning I awoke at first light, around 4:30 A.M., with the notion that poets were anthropologists of the soul." Jim Harrison • Brick

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"The poet most likely to practice and evoke ethical imagination is not 'poetical,' in the sense of flamboyant or opinionated. Thinking of Shakespeare, Keats, who was Shelley's contemporary, claimed that the most powerful versifier 'has no identity' at all, for 'he is continually . . . filling some other body.' Eric G Wilson • Chronicle of Higher Education

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"The partial autobiography offered in this book reveals a poet long at war with himself, and a style at war with almost everything else." William Logan on DA Powell and others • New Criterion

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"One of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s aims seems to have been to defend Scottish literature against archaising folk-revivalists. (His neoclassicism, however, was a ‘rearmament programme’.) ‘There is no need for Scotland to be different from other nations,’ he wrote in 1966, in his short Autobiographical Sketch. ‘We should have a contemporary literature like everywhere else.’" Fatima Ahmed • LRB

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"Too many books. Thousands each year. As Yogi Berra said (about a restaurant), 'No one goes there nowadays, it's too crowded.'" Jordan Davis • The Best American Poetry

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"I agree, without proviso, with Ishmael, who comes to realize that 'attainable felicity' is not located 'in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country'—all tangible things, the first held close by the second, a doing and being, its laws and effects the poetry of life; the others—more prosaic but beautiful nonetheless—purchased stuff." Jerry DeNuccio • The Smart Set

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"Any critic should know the text she’s criticizing like the back of her hand, or at least have a sense of the angles that she’s missed if only so she can respond when she is questioned or attacked for her opinion. When your textual output is opinion, when your literary work (so to speak) is the critical essay, you live off the lack of separation." Katrina Stuart Santiago in conversation with Caroline S Hau and Miguel Syjuco • Manila Review

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"Last but not least, something that should be seriously considered by the UN: Baudelaire wanted to add to the list of human rights: le droit de s'en aller, 'the right to go away.'" Roberto Calasso • Guardian

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"After all these decades, John Ashbery remains our great singer of homelessness, our alienation in this rented house." Michael Robbins • Chicago Tribune

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"Slow motion appeals to videopoetry for a number of reasons: the effect suggests a gradual suspension of time; a dream-like state is evoked; action unfolds like a painting; a perception of reality is emphasized. In the structure of the videopoem, it functions as punctuation." Tom Konyves • Critical Inquiry

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"Yet knowing exactly what the work is when it is just itself seems precisely what the work sets out to defeat. Recall T. W. Adorno on the Rätselcharakter of the modernist artwork: 'If a work opens itself completely, it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection; then the work vanishes into the distance, only to return to those who thought they understood it, overwhelming them for a second time with the question: "What is it?"'" Gerald Bruns on David Antin and Charles Bernstein • Jacket2

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"It is not for love of love poetry that love poets write, Robert Graves said, and politics too is a subject that will typically be thrust on poets, rather than sought out, pitched into the imagination like King Billy’s ‘bomb balls’ in Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’." David Wheatley • Edinburgh Review

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"It should be noted that the Baroness had written a number of suicidal letters to Barnes around this time (she was short on funds and the winter was very long), but still, it looked like a mistake, or a joke. That is to say, 'coffee' is close enough to 'coffin.' L.H.O.O.Q." Vanessa Place • Constant Critic (pdf)

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"[T]here’s an arbitrariness to what history allows to survive and what it doesn’t. Sometimes a cannonball, sometimes an earthquake, sometimes a bulldozer. And so things get piled on top of things and people try to make sense but there is no sense." Evan Jones in conversation with Chad Campbell • Maisonneuve

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"[F]or an odd, suspended moment, Percy Shelley was a pop icon: a stanza of his was cited again and again, inflected with admiration and admonishment, and some fear and much dark joy." Joshua Clover • American Reader

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"[C]ollecting them in lists is not getting there, to the heart of the matter, to the meadow of first permission (as Robert Duncan, another great California poet who invokes childhood memories, might have it). We need all our words, all our imaginings, to get there." Charles Alexander on Beverly Dahlen • Jacket2

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"Hilarious yes, but, in the rarefied space of a sonnet, placing Whitman’s Song of Myself and Sappho’s archaic lyrics alongside a children’s book about poop is, not leveling, but widening." Sarah Case on Peter Gizzi and K. Silem Mohammad • Jacket2

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"[TS] Eliot consciously chose untrendy underwear for his typist. The reason for this . . . is that he wanted The Waste Land to be a bitty poem, full of unassimilated detail." Beci Dobbin in conversation with Richard Marshall • 3:AM

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"So while he is a helpful interpreter of Homer, and the edition is rich in information, [Anthony] Verity’s Iliad is much less energetic than Fagles’s and, compared with Lattimore’s, its slightly more modern vocabulary does not make up for the lost sonority and movement." John Farrell • LARB

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"The continuous present is a little like the rabbit that the greyhounds chase. Meanwhile the bettors are keeping track of the number of laps that the greyhounds are running, to fill out this metaphor." Al Filreis, Thomas Devaney, Tom Mandel, and Bob Perelman on Lyn Hejinian • Jacket2

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"[Paul Legault] is, after all, the same writer who took Dickinson's poem 325 'There came a Day — at Summer’s full — / Entirely for me —' and wrote 'This one day I had sex all day. That day, words were as useful to me as clothes are to Jesus. Which is to say: useless.' Alexandra Socarides • LARB

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"Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting." Christian Wiman • American Scholar

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"The nick is the time of the line itself, the scan of poetic meter, but not as something that stays regular or predictable. It stops and starts, alters its pace and spatial form, breaks open white space unexpectedly, and registers a loss it can neither forestall nor redeem. We are left with the question, What kind of time is the time of tragedy?" Judith Butler on Anne Carson • Public Books

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"[Robert Duncan's] teaching method was to collage 'conversations between texts,' just as his poems did. He rejected the workshop model of likes and dislikes, taste and distaste: 'We will be detectives not judges.... Week by week we will study . . . vowels, consonants, the structure of rime.' And he gave students and audiences what they implicitly craved from poetry: meaning, stakes. 'Poetry is not my stock in trade, it is my life.' 'In language I encounter God.' 'To become a poet, means to be aware of creation. . .' 'Vowels the spirit, Consonants the body.'" Ange Mlinko • The Nation

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"Its use of mathematics is so fresh even now, over forty years since it was first published, that it will strike most people as bizarre." Bob Grumman on Louis Zukofsky • Scientific American

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