"You can talk about Ralph and his work in all sorts of ways. Most visibly, there’s Ralph as political activist. There’s also the way in which he figures forth Lorca’s idea of duende – often in the paintings that incorporate words, and especially in the Sangro sequence; but also in a monumental piece like Black Phoenix. “All that has dark sounds has duende.”" Bill Manhire and others remember Ralph Hotere • NZ Listener

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Brodsky famously suggested that Mandelstam's development as a poet was steady, until he was broken by the juggernaut of Soviet history. His always-subversive poetry took on a terrible acceleration subsequent to his arrest and exile. Mandelstam's voice gave us both the epigram to Stalin and the ode. James Stotts on Osip Mandelstam • Critical Flame

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"[T]here was a common feeling that verse was something given one to write, and that the form it might then take was intimate with that fact. That's what I at least meant by, 'Form is never more than an extension of content.'" Robert Creeley in conversation with Lewis MacAdams and Linda Wagner-Martin • Paris Review

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"I realized that by saying so little, Warhol was inverting the traditional form of the interview; I ended up knowing much more about Buchloh than I did about Warhol." Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation with Mark Allen • The Awl

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"The younger looked up at dad, and father nodded to son, and son blurted: 'Sell me the English major!' Through my brain's murk, I searched for the hype. Failing to find it, I confessed: 'It makes you weird.'" Eric G Wilson • Chronicle Review

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"Marianne Moore was approached by Ford in 1957 to come up with a name for the car that ended up as the Edsel, after Ford’s son, passing up the poet’s suggestions like Utopian Turtletop, Mongoose Civique, and Pastelogram—an instance of going from bad to verse[.]" Mike Chasar and Jed Rasula • Boston Review

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"[Marjorie Perloff] departs from many of her contemporaries, who in their valuable critiques of 'Close Reading' have sometimes lost the poetry baby in the contextual bath water. Indeed, Perloff swims against the tide of cultural and historical criticism that focuses more on the bath than the baby, leaving poetry to take a bath, that is get soaked, while the aesthetic languishes high and dry." Charles Bernstein • Jacket2

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"[Nicholas] Roe’s Keats was not so attached to the ideal of beauty that he would overlook or ignore its earthly embodiments (indeed, the folly of so doing is a central part of the meaning of Endymion). Roe underlines the avidity of the young Keats for sexual experience, a trait perhaps traceable to his mother, who was much given to 'pleasure.'" David Womersley • Standpoint

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"Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you would have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries--must pay for it with a proportionate price." Walt Whitman • Byliner

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"Known to adherents as 'the science, 'pataphysics is a system in which there are no rules, only exceptions (or, more properly, where each exception creates its own rule), and where everything is equivalent—nothing is more important than anything else." Andrew Hultkrans • Bookforum

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"[I]n [Marjorie] Perloff’s work, literary writing has always a strong procedural and programmatic dimension, which links the materiality of the text to the ideality of a concept, a project, a poetics." Jan Baetens • Jacket2

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"He was secretly happy to live only a short drive from Buffalo Bill's grave." Tom Raworth on Anselm Hollo • Independent

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"Why should one want to get close to such a man? Mainly, perhaps, because of some very fine poems." Alistair Fowler on Wyatt • TLS

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"Marjorie Perloff's minute readings of the linebreaks of Williams and Oppen remain models of sheer inspective energy and should be required reading for young poets." Richard Sieburth • Jacket2

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"My point is that Kalogeris’ Dialogos challenges and renews the trope of internal dialogue. The strategy is not dissimilar to how Carson’s Nox was supposed to work, with Catullus’ poem at hand to extend her speaker’s compass." Daniel Bosch • The Rumpus

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"On the one hand I have always felt the most important thing that a writer should do is to write something that people will understand. But I also want to write poetry that expresses my usually tangled thoughts without condescending to a reader." John Ashbery • Spectator

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"[Marcus Wicker] also fuses hip-hop’s restless dexterity, its as-if-improvised fusion of amazement and momentum and force, with an ability to reward the less purely propulsive experience of reading on the page." Jonathan Farmer • Slate

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"He begins with Charles Olson’s poetry and prose protests against historical architectural negation in Gloucester, the Massachusetts fishing town he called home. Buildings he loved and believed held important meanings for the common good of the local future, were razed. But thanks to an editor who shared his devotion, urgent issues were brought up, and the documentary record provides a fine example of commitment by someone with roots in a particular place." Barbara Berman on Poets Beyond the Barricade • The Rumpus

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"In Durcan’s hands poetry become a method of personal and political liberation rather than a narrowband 'CB'-style conversation between intellectuals determined that no one should overhear them or break their code—to discover perhaps that nothing of consequence, even to the poets concerned, is under discussion. His poetry moved towards public engagement in a period when many of his contemporaries were retreating into high mythologising, theological hankering, and the marginal comfort zone. Failures are inevitable when risks are taken and one thing that is undeniable about southern Irish poetry is that it has not failed half enough of late. Durcan’s failures have done more for Irish poetry than many a safer, more equilibrious poet’s triumphs ever have." Dave Lordan • Southword

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"Anyhow, you can’t only stick to greats — it’s not good for the health. Fearing is an antidote, in small doses. He’s a reminder of the diversity of the art, as a writer of very good poems of a kind you forgot, or never knew, were possible, because here we are in 2013, 
not 1935. In 1935, lots and lots of people were desperate, war loomed, unemployment was high, jobs were scarce, the rich were savagely 
rich, and — wait a minute." Daisy Fried Poetry

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"I burned with the hard gemlike flame of the moth for that star of unoriginal genius. Mixed allusions, like mixed metaphors and unoriginal ideas, are often what one wants: what oft was thought but not exactly so expressed." Jerome McGann on Marjorie Perloff • Jacket2

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"[Marjorie Perloff is] not out to vanquish tradition but to show its multiplicity." Joan Retallack

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"He notices a bunch of angles on ethics, but settles for a minimally competent aesthetics, when he could have had both." Daniel Bosch on Frederick Seidel • Berfrois

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"As for stirring formulations about poetry, they are absent from [TS Eliot's] letters. He remarked to his spiritual counselor, William Force Stead, that he failed to see why so many people wanted to write about poetry: 'God knows why; it seems to me the dullest subject going.'" William H Pritchard • Weekly Standard "Since then the impression has been consolidated: Eliot was philosophically minded, stately and occasionally haughty, and yet an expert networker. From time to time he flirted with the possibility of an academic career. He allowed just a few friends to see his more playful aspects – among them a taste for the “minor pleasures of drunkenness and adultery”." Henry Hitchings • FT "If it were possible to run a software check on the book’s most characteristic phrase, it would undoubtedly be ‘I very much regret…’" DJ Taylor • Spectator

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"In the Lincoln Arcade on Broadway, in the studio of painter Louis Bouché, where she earned her livelihood posing nude, Bouché recalled [Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven] reciting a poem (no longer extant) whose refrain was, 'Marcel, Marcel, I love you like Hell, Marcel,' while giving her nude body a rubdown with a copy of Nude Descending a Staircase." Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo • MIT Press (pdf)

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"Poetry as making, as praxis — the work of urban, technological, multilinguistic Futurists, Concretists, Oulipeans, and Language writers — contests the slackness of mediated enterprises. Its arena is a site of combat; its tenor, resistance; its lineage, a century of artificers at work both on and off the page." Dee Morris on Marjorie Perloff • Jacket2

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"Not even nature resists change, although it does repeat itself year after year, bringing new finches and growing different flowers even though the seasons themselves seem unchanging. 'Nature repeats herself,' [Elizabeth] Bishop concedes, 'or almost does: / repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.'" Casey N. Cep • Paris Review

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"I’m not interested in a poetry that removes itself from our most human risks: world, word, and the agonistic encounter with another that the lyric poem generously opens within itself—difficult gifts where opposition reconciles even as it occurs." Dan Beachy-Quick • Boston Review

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