"In 1937, while exiled in Svendborg, Denmark, Brecht produced a cycle of unrhymed epigrams that he called Deutsche Kriegsfibel (German War Primer), which he published in the Moscow-based German monthly Das Wort and later included in his Svendborg Poems. Brecht’s frequent collaborator from his Weimar years, the composer Hanns Eisler—who, in American exile, would furnish the score for the anti-Nazi Hollywood film Hangmen Also Die! (1943), co-written by Brecht and directed by fellow European transplant Fritz Lang—soon adapted the epigrams into an operatic composition titled Against War.” Noah Isenberg • The Nation

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"One evening, after bathing her daughter and sharing with her their favorite desert — sakuramochi, a pink ball of sweet sticky-rice wrapped in a salty cherry tree leaf — Kaneko went into her study, wrote a letter to her husband asking that he let her mother raise the girl, and took her own life a month before her twenty-seventh birthday.” Maria Popova • brain pickings

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"In 1939 Miłosz had found work as a janitor at the Warsaw University library, which was closed to the public, in order to get a daily bowl of soup and have access to books.” Charles Simic • NYRB

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"But I was pleased to learn that John Ashbery really liked to tell jokes. One joke John told Ted unrolled in the following circumstance: Ted goes over to Frank O'Hara's to get some poems for "C". It is late Sunday morning. Frank hasn't come out of the bedroom yet, actually. Then John comes over too, and Frank still hasn't come out (I don't know how they got into the apartment! the door had been left open?) They wait, they wait. Then, Jim Brodey comes out of Frank's bedroom, and leaves. Then Ted and John wait some more. Then John tells Ted the following joke. John: Have you heard about the Dumb Bunny Bomb? Ted: No, John. John: You drop it over a large city, and all its inhabitants instantly become stupid. (Pause) I think they dropped it this morning.” Alice Notley • Brooklyn Rail

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"Just as I had begun to think Emre’s preferences for personal essays would be disastrous if applied to poetry—because I see poetry as, among other things, consciousness put down on the page—her parsing of Gaitskill’s “mechanicalness” and the importance of being vigilant of its myriad tentacles makes perfect sense when we remember that the worst poetry often mines clichés, the mechanical and rote accommodation of predictable ideation around (as above) dating, the social mediatization of one’s ideas or real-life experience, sexual mores, coolness, troubling political realities, etc.”Nyla Matuk • Berfrois

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"Of [Jack] Gilbert's favored words, probably none conveys better the poet -- his life, his work, his ambitions for both -- than magnitude. ” John Penner • LA Times

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"The first words spoken by a mortal in Virgil’s poem are Aeneas’ in terror of the storm and in dread of a watery grave.” A.E. Stallings • The Hudson Review

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"Away from social media, [Leontia] Flynn archives instead the near past of the pre-internet.” John McAuliffe • The Irish Times

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"Was Arnold any good as a poet? Or rather, to anticipate an answer – which is that, yes, I think he was very good – what are we to make of the fact that so many of his readers, both contemporary and since, have thought he wasn’t up to much?” Seamus Perry • TLS

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"The new details will not change most perceptions about Wilbur’s “almost suspiciously normal life,” although it should dispel the sense that he shared none of the horrors and despair of his more self-revealing peers.” A.M. Juster • First Things

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"Newspapers a century ago often carried verse, and verse, learned by heart at school, was also recited at home. Public verse was high on patriotic hope in 1914. A line from the first stanza of ‘For the Fallen’, lamenting those who have ‘Fallen in the cause of the free’, was absolutely meant.” Michael Alexander • Literary Review

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“We are cast by chance into an age in which nothing is worse than to be openly ignorant, nothing more rare than to be fully learned.” John Donne • Guardian

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"In his new book, Bunk, a cultural history of hoaxes in America, the poet Kevin Young argues that the popularity of the Sun’s story “owed much to its re-creating on the Moon what many white readers believed could be found at home.” Robert P. Baird • Esquire

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"In “To Thom Gunn in Los Altos, California”, his friend Donald Davie wrote: “Conquistador! Live dangerously, my Byron, / In this metropolis / Of Finistere. Drop off / The edge repeatedly, and come / Back to tell us!”” Patrick McGuinness • The Guardian

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"Plagiarists rarely confess their sin, the worst a writer can commit. Almost all, when caught, make excuses. The most common are: (1) everyone does it, (2) it’s not really plagiarism, (3) any similarities are slight or irrelevant, (4) I forgot to cite the sources, (5) quotation marks and citations were accidentally removed, (6) the passages are only a small part of the book, (7) I unconsciously memorized the original, (8) my researcher is to blame, (9) drinking, drugs, or mental illness is to blame, and (10) the critic who caught me is to blame.” William Logan • The Walrus

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"'Many' or 'multiple' could suggest that he’s much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, he’d like to be on. Or, it could be that he’s this untrustworthy kind of guy who is always going to get out of any situation by turning it to his advantage. It could be that he’s the turner." Emily Wilson • New York Times

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"[Robyn] Sarah’s entire career is an antidote to the pervasive anxiety about poetry’s incomprehensibility. " Anita Lahey • The Walrus

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"Modigliani produced several drawings and paintings of the young Akhmatova that captured the elegant lines and distinct features of the poet whom critics would soon call the Russian Sappho." Martin Puchner • Lithub

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"I emotionally buckle at this display of passion and lament about paternal relationships." Jonathan Tait • The Stray

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"These were the people who had learned from his verses how to shape their dreams and dream their love, and forlorn and enraged, they chanted that their bard was alive inside them." Ariel Dorfman NYT

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