The Page - poetry, essays, ideas

Dan Beachy-Quick Poetry

2012-02-11T00:00:00.003Z

“'In this century English poetry,' [Philip] Larkin maintained, 'went off on a loop-line that took it away from the general reader.' He offers several 'reasons.' The first, 'the aberration of modernism, that blighted all the arts,' simply begs the question; the second, 'the emergence of English literature as an academic subject, and the consequent demand for a kind of poetry that needed elucidation' reflects his own rejection of modernism and his antipathy for academic criticism." Francis-Noël Thomas • Humanities

Daniel Hoffman New Criterion

2012-02-10T00:00:00.001Z

"For critics, some of his pronouncements on the 'extinction' of Arab culture, or the 'Arab mind', have an orientalist taint. Yet his translator Khaled Mattawa, an Arab American poet, sees it as measured iconoclasm." Maya Jaggi on Adonis • Guardian

Medbh McGuckian Southword

2012-02-09T00:00:00.000Z

"Poetry, we surmise from these introductory remarks, is essentially a teenagers' pastime. Writing and reading it can help our young people stay off the streets and express their better selves. But such self-expression, friends, has its limits: when we grow up, we must turn from poetry to things that matter - real things! Shades of the prison house, as Wordsworth put it in the great Immortality Ode, begin to close upon us. In the meantime, though, there is 'finding your voice'." Marjorie Perloff on Michelle Obama • PN Review

Julian Stannard World Literature Today

2012-02-08T00:00:00.004Z

"[A]s we traverse the folds, the book reveals its story by accrual, through a curated experience of the artist's personal narrative placed in the context of the classical tradition in poetry, and the subjects of death and family, loss and remembrance." Lorraine Martinuik on Anne Carson • Jacket2

Pearse Hutchinson Gallery

2012-02-07T00:00:00.003Z

"More than most, Irish poets move between languages, and Mahon is an outstanding analyst of the linguistic unhousing that is so much a part of Irish tradition." Aingeal Clare • Guardian

JP Dancing Bear Arch

2012-02-06T00:00:00.001Z

"Art offers us not tools to master our universe but the potential to experience community, interconnectivity, wide identification—the possibility of wisdom." Heidi-Lynn Staples • Interim

Dana Gioia World Literature Today

2012-02-05T00:00:00.002Z

"Sher Alam Shinwari, a literary critic, explains that modern Pashtun poetry is a poetry of resistance. 'Every poem created by a poet challenges the Taliban mindset,' he says, adding that more than a hundred poetry collections were published in the first seven months of 2011." Shaheen Buneri • Boston Review

Mathias Svalina Diode

2012-02-04T00:00:00.002Z

"Which Poetry Editor Are You? (The following is intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be used to ascertain one’s eligibility for grants.)" Lucy Ives • Poetry

AE Stalling Poetry

2012-02-03T00:06:00.001Z

"Peters acknowledges their continuing bond but finds what she sees as Zukofsky’s sexism and superciliousness deplorable." Majorie Perloff on Lorine Niedecker • TLS

Wislawa Szymborska, trans. Joanna Trzeciak Poetry

2012-02-02T00:00:00.003Z

"After all, considering that we must live either in the country or in the town, the person who does not notice one or the other is more eccentric than the person who does." Virginia Woolf on Edward Thomas (1917) • TLS

Maurice Riordan Molossus

2012-02-01T00:00:00.002Z

"Two millennia ago, the farmer-poet Horace called his plutocratic patron – and friend - Maecenas "the shield and glory of my life". Today's Maecenases need, at least, dialogue not disdain." Boyd Tomkin • Independent

Paul Violi Hanging Loose

2012-01-31T00:00:00.000Z

"The mythic vision of engaging Apollo in a divine music-making contest devolves into notes that would seem more appropriate for a toilet-paper-roll blowgun." Tom Sleigh • Blackbird

Michael Robbins The Awl

2012-01-30T00:00:00.002Z

"Warren took it upon himself to write a thirty-page handout on metrics and imagery, which was first used in the spring semester of 1935. A year later, the handout had been expanded to include fiction, drama, and prose—and was printed by LSU with the title, An Approach to Literature. (The scholarly old-guard on campus, unimpressed by the book, began calling it 'The Reproach to Literature.')" Garrick Davis • Contemporary Poetry Review

Rowan Ricardo Phillips Granta

2012-01-29T00:00:00.002Z

"If I saw all of these movies, I asked myself, how did I ever find the time to sleep, eat, read books, teach students, raise a family and write hundreds of poems?" Charles Simic • NYRB

Gregory O'Brien foam:e

2012-01-28T00:00:00.003Z

"The poetry of ease (should such a thing exist) would be poetry that does not speak of that state as one speaks of an unknown country we might wish one day to visit—Cockaigne, Bensalem, Innisfree—but rather a poetry that expresses ease as we express our native air: stirring it with our living presence, not exhausting it with our efforts." Oren Izenberg • Nonsite

Vera Pavlova VQR

2012-01-27T00:00:00.004Z

"However, we must settle down, here at the back of the class, and grant that The Complete Poems is an almost fanatically painstaking and altogether admirable piece of work." John Banville • Guardian

Susan Stewart Interim

2012-01-26T00:00:00.002Z

"Frivolous and serious, mischievous and magisterial, poets play both sides of the coin of freedom — heads they study (“the scholar’s art,” Wallace Stevens called poetry), tails they frisk. If freedom and poetry seem paradoxical, freedom and poets are all but identical." Ange Mlinko on Susan Stewart • LARB (scroll down)

John Ashbery Boston Review

2012-01-25T00:00:00.004Z

"His translation frequently makes the verbal imperatives of an epic style an aid to vividness." Jeremy Noel-Tod on Simon Armitage • Telegraph

John Peck Free Verse

2012-01-24T00:00:00.004Z

"He was often reduced to penury, and the humiliation of calling on his muses to plea for money in verse." Charles Isherwood on Ben Jonson • NYT

Ange Mlinko Nonsite

2012-01-23T00:00:00.004Z

"Squeak, there are other animals inside the pump, the great manatee -- Trichechus manatus -- you've seen it float like a rug that has something wrapped in it among grasses that will not return." Brenda Hillman • Interim

August Kleinzahler foam:e

2012-01-22T00:00:00.002Z

"You know, on my first book I got one rather favorable review that wound up saying, “she has no philosophy whatever.” People who are city people are often bothered by all this “nature” in my poems." Elizabeth Bishop (1977) • Ploughshares

David Wheatley The Burning Bush

2012-01-21T00:00:00.004Z

"The lack of substantive criticism of his work is almost certainly due to the fact that each sympathetic critic who comes along—Hollander, Ormsby—feels duty-bound to make the case for the poet afresh, with just enough space left over for those so inclined—Kinzie, or more recently Jason Guriel—to distinguish between Hine’s best work and those places where his genius, to revise Hollander, doesn’t know where to leave off." Bill Coyle on Daryl Hine • CPR

Amy Beeder Blackbird

2012-01-20T00:00:00.001Z

"I don’t mean that the classics are synonymous with Western culture; there are of course many other multicultural strands and traditions that demand our attention, define who we are, and without which the contemporary world would be immeasurably poorer. But the fact is that Dante read Virgil’s Aeneid, not the epic of Gilgamesh." Mary Beard • NYRB

Aidan Rooney Electric Monsoon

2012-01-19T00:00:00.002Z

"All poems, like all children, are in some wide sense mis-translations, altered or incorrect adaptations, based on earlier generations of people or poems." Stephen Burt • Almost Island

Leonard Cohen New Yorker

2012-01-18T00:00:00.003Z

"But to return to the older model of walking. It’s no accident that our word for the basic measure of prosody, of poetic structure, is ‘foot.’ [...] We may associate the evolved forms of human culture, including poetry, with post-nomadic settlement and the life of cities – with the polis and with metropolitan sophistication – but how we know stuff, how we access and structure our knowledge and understanding of what matters, may very well involve archaic modes of cognition activated and produced through complex interactions of walking, perceiving, thinking, and talking. Ian Wedde • ka mate ka ora

Elizabeth Robinson Conjunctions

2012-01-17T00:00:00.002Z

"And the alternatives the Modernists offered were abstraction and collage. Abstraction was a kind of escape hatch that let you evade culturally degraded materials so you could attend to other things, while collage was a strategy of accepting these clichés, fragmenting, combining, reframing them and applying them to another purpose." David Antin • Dear Navigator

Matthew Guenette Diagram

2012-01-16T00:00:00.003Z

"This space of compassion—poetry—is the space from which we should address immigration and education policy." Craig Santos Perez • Kenyon Review

Bob Hicok Diode

2012-01-15T00:00:00.005Z

"In the blue dark of 3 a.m., images cycle through the mind, though the eyes remain open and fixed." Brian Turner • VQR

Dennis O'Driscoll American Poetry Review

2012-01-14T00:00:00.004Z

"Subject matter itself is at a crossroads right now in American poetry." Arielle Greenberg • American Poetry Review

Keston Sutherland The Claudius App

2012-01-13T00:00:00.002Z

"The referential largesse of the poems felt, then, like a kind of counterbalance." Peter Campion on David Wojahn • Diode

Valzhyna Mort VQR

2012-01-12T00:00:00.003Z

"With some notable exceptions, taste is not a moral category." Jonathan Farmer • The Millions

Dmitry Kuzmin Words Without Borders

2012-01-11T00:00:00.002Z

"In spite of their fierce words, many poets worry that they are the final generation to speak their native tongue." Clare Sullivan • World Literature Today

Dorianne Laux Burnside Review

2012-01-10T00:00:00.002Z

"I think of what Wallace Stevens says in The Necessary Angel. A poet has no moral role. A poet has to use imagination to press back against the violence of reality. I don’t agree. He also wrote that reality was growing more insistent, more violent. I agree with that." Eliza Griswold • Poetry

Eamon Grennan Gallery

2012-01-09T00:00:00.003Z

"He has been called a misfit, a dreamer, a sinner, a castaway, a wayward child, a hobgoblin, a flibbertigibbet, a waif, a weird, a pariah, a prodigal, a picturesque ruin, a sensitive plant, an exquisite machine with insufficient steam, the oddest of God’s creatures, and, most frequently—by his father, his mother, his brother, and his sister; by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle; and by countless others over the years—“Poor Hartley.”" Anne Fadiman • Lapham's Quarterly

Christopher Middleton Poetry Review

2012-01-08T00:00:00.005Z

"[Max] Jacob told Maurice Martin du Gard in 1920, “It’s Picasso who changed my life…It was he who told me, ‘Shave off your beard.’ He who told me, ‘Take off your pince-nez, wear a monocle. Don’t be time-puncher. Live like a poet.’”" Rosanna Warren • Little Star

Gottfried Benn Paris Review

2012-01-07T00:00:00.003Z

"All four poets are reacting to big modern systems, above all to the system called capitalism, whose results and failures seem inescapable, from the swells of the North Pacific (where miles of plastic collect and glaciers decay) to the American flag on the moon. Their poems look like disrupted systems, fractured but conveying information nonetheless. In paths through and under and around those systems, economic, environmental and linguistic, these poets address what the critic and poet Christopher Nealon calls the “matter of capital,” the built-up stuff (facts and texts) that our social system manipulates and accumulates, treats as fungible or attempts to discard." Stephen Burt • The Nation

William Logan New Criterion

2012-01-06T00:00:00.004Z

"Provincial though they might be, these poets do not write for readers whose interest is Little England. They are about as far from the English Defence League as you could get and they would be strident in their condemnation of the EDL’s hijackings of nationality." Ian Pople • Manchester Review

Louise Gluck Poetry

2012-01-05T00:00:00.003Z

"What occurs in the process of writing a lyric poem is the diminishment of temporal suspension and of experience (real or imagined) that initiated the poem." Jason Tandon on Charles Simic • Rattle

Andrew Jamison Brick

2012-01-04T00:00:00.002Z

"His irreverence is a bracing antidote to just about any edition of the evening news: “I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins,” he says in “The Experience,” “but he can be very persuasive.”" Dana Jennings on Simon Armitage and others • NYT

Ange Mlinko Paris Review

2012-01-03T00:00:00.001Z

"Even dedicated readers of poetry in our own time can be divided into two groups: those who know Vachel Lindsay and his work, and those who don’t." TR Hummer • Slate

Norm Sibum The Bow-Wow Shop

2012-01-02T00:00:00.002Z

"[Georgia] O’Keeffe’s letters, by contrast, are alert to the physical world, to the power of words, and to punctuation. Pages of manuscript reproduced in these books reveal that her dashes, like Emily Dickinson’s, assume all sorts of shapes, from squiggles to playful curlicues to abrupt downward slopes." Christopher Benfey • NYRB

Devin Johnston NPR

2012-01-01T00:00:00.002Z

"For Neruda in Chile, India, or Spain in the 1930s, a poem was a more powerful vehicle than a newspaper, but in America in 2011, we all agreed that a prose piece in the Times gave Hass not only a wider audience but a level of credibility a poem might not." Dean Rader • Huffington Post

WS Merwin NYRB

2011-12-31T00:00:00.004Z

"Perhaps she took Whitman seriously when he urged the poets of the future never to humble themselves to anyone." Philip Levine on Ruth Stone • NYT

Rory Waterman Manchester Review

2011-12-30T00:00:00.001Z

"The brief quatrains of poems like ‘The End of Marriage’ and ‘The Catch’ are metrically unpredictable, altering their pace to admit half-dissonant notes. In the latter, the speaker tellingly confesses that “It’s not the theme that interests me / but the variation”. Greenlaw has conclusively mastered the poetry of provisionality, of sidelong looks." Chloe Stopa-Hunt • Poetry Review

Margaret Gibson Georgia Review

2011-12-29T00:00:00.002Z

"I have so far mentioned just a few of the poems in this collection, and I should do more to point out its stylistic breadth. That’s quickest done by leaping from De’Ath to W.N. Herbert, with his 'Errant' (or an extract from it). Within the context of this anthology, Herbert seems deeply unfashionable. He rhymes in a way that is rare here—and fashion (or lack of it) is an idea he plays about in the early lines." Aime Williams • Oxonian Review

Nathaniel Mackey Blackbox Manifold

2011-12-28T00:00:00.002Z

"One could, of course, write a more contemporary Conference of the Birds, with ever increasing dangers to the birds on their pilgrimage." Melissa Kwasny • Pleiades

D Nurske Threepenny Review

2011-12-27T00:00:00.004Z

"Why, I wondered, is a workshop supposed to make a poem 'better'? And in making a poem 'better' by implicitly turning to a set of inherited conditions that have proven their worth over the course of nearly a century, am I secretly pushing students into a place of received values that, in the end, undermines exactly that sort of complicating work poetry does, and for which I love it so deeply? Am I myself a product of such molding?" Dan Beachy-Quick • Poetry

Kerry Hardie The Bow-Wow Shop

2011-12-26T00:00:00.008Z

"What gets [Anne] Wilkinson out into the sunshine, however, is the manner in which she shakes Thomas’s ghost. Because even as she welcomes the apocalypse, she is frustrated by it, turning and twisting the prophetic with a shake of her head. Hers is what Northrop Frye called a “parody-apocalypse”." Evan Jones • Poetry Review

Kathleen Jamie Poetry Review

2011-12-25T00:00:00.002Z

"I was already a keen fan of his Homer translations. To my delight and confusion, not long after first looking into the Homer, I took a date to see Ken Russell’s The Devils and there was Christopher Logue as Cardinal Richelieu." August Kleinzahler • LRB

Charles Wright Kenyon Review

2011-12-24T00:00:00.003Z

"With a generation of children raised on Horrible Histories, Armitage's version might do for alliteration what Eliot's Practical Cats once did for rhythm." Sean O'Brien • Guardian

CK Williams Threepenny Review

2011-12-23T00:00:00.002Z

"Painful though it must have been to write about the horror of the Troubles, an even more difficult task, as Heaney acknowledges in his essay “Feeling into Words” (1974), was to achieve “the perspective of a humane reason” at the same time as granting “the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity”." Andrew McCullough • TLS

Graham Foust Gulf Coast

2011-12-22T00:00:00.004Z

"The preference, as always, is for a body of shared knowledge. In this, at least, she is quite unlike Bishop who is more than willing to report back from unfamiliar terrain." John Redmond on Kay Ryan • Tower Poetry

Mark Strand Kenyon Review

2011-12-21T00:00:00.001Z

"[T]he past few years have seen a steady stream of Poet’s Novels, a phrase I’m borrowing from the subtitle of Eileen Myles’s Inferno: A Poet’s Novel and using here to describe the not-quite-genre of fiction (a) that features a poet as a protagonist and (b) in which said poet’s status as poet is materially relevant to the story—i.e., not purely symbolic, not used as some kind of idiot shorthand for indicating any version of a 'poetic' nature, and not a cheap way for the novelist to avoid writing a book about a novelist." Justin Taylor • Poetry

Helen Mort Blackbox Manifold

2011-12-20T00:00:00.001Z

"Living in Britain is an incredibly intense linguistic experience, and a lot of that relates closely to geography: your accent, your dialect, your background, your class. Many poems are expressions of that, even subconsciously. At some level I knew my vocabulary was a product of my landscape." Simon Armitage • Guardian

Mads Bajarias Philippines Free Press

2011-12-19T00:00:00.000Z

"With a composite speaker as a sort of open secret underpinning the sequence, emphasis in Canto falls instead upon questions of construction. In their chosen verse-form for this effort—terza rima, but modified through careful use of slant-rhyme—[Dan] Beachy-Quick and [Srikanth] Reddy turn a lyric form based in recollection instead towards an anticipatory uncertainty." Andrew Rippeon • Jacket2

Farnoosh Fathi Poetry

2011-12-18T00:00:00.004Z

"[P]oetry criticism should also be impossible: if a poem is any good it should exceed and complicate any statement that you want to make about it--the trick is to say things that are true nevertheless. (If you do not feel that your task is impossible to execute completely then you are doing it wrong, or else you are discussing a very minor poem.)" Stephen Burt • PN Review

Christopher Logue LRB

2011-12-17T00:00:00.002Z

"He was an autodidact, a village explainer. As Gertrude Stein wrote of Ezra Pound, "fine if you were a village; if not, not". I was happy to be a village. He was habitually under-awed." Craig Raine • Guardian

August Kleinzahler LRB

2011-12-16T00:00:00.000Z

"Few poets as far on in their careers as Mahon remain capable of poems as strange, compelling and lovely as “Shandon Bridge”. Derek Mahon is one of those poets, and is one of the sovereign imaginations of our time. Up and down though it is, like a mountain range, New Collected Poems still harbours a glorious and inexhaustible body of work." David Wheatley • DRB

Campbell McGrath Ploughshares

2011-12-15T00:00:00.004Z

"I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking. It goes lower than rhetoric, lower than conversation, lower than logic, right down to the very faint honest voice at the bottom of the skull." Alice Oswald • Guardian "Perhaps there is something else we should consider – poetry's power to heal. Take it from the rich, give it to a poet and reader. The TS Eliot prize cleans the money." Gillian Clarke • Guardian

Emmalea Russo Anderbo

2011-12-14T00:00:00.001Z

"I’m always surprised by the panicked fear Conceptual writing can elicit from other poets, as if they’re going to have to abandon their writing and be forced to transcribe newspapers for the rest of their careers." Craig Dworkin in conversation with Katie L. Price • Jacket2

Henry Israeli Fail Better

2011-12-13T00:00:00.001Z

"Our own language prompts us in one direction, but the text we are trying to respect says something else, or says the same thing in a way that feels very different. We have come to what Paul Celan meant when, despairing of translating Baudelaire, he remarked that 'poetry is the fatal uniqueness of language.'" Tim Parks • NYRB

Eliza Victoria Stone Telling

2011-12-12T00:00:00.003Z

"[E]very generation burrows into its own hard-earned defenses, and it is the prerogative of the young to challenge—yes, and shock—their elders." Rita Dove • NYRB

Vona Groarke Poetry Daily / Poetry Ireland Review

2011-12-11T00:00:00.001Z

"Yeats, in 'The Fisherman,' thought a poem should be 'cold/And passionate as the dawn'—that it should embody, along with the rising passion of inception, the cold inquisition of detached self-critique. It is not a goal easily attained, and it is never attained by most of the poets of any century, in any country, of any race." Helen Vendler • NYRB

Claire Crowther Blackbox Manifold

2011-12-10T00:00:00.001Z

"[Mina] Loy shows herself to be better at manipulating Futurist conventions in idiom than the Futurists themselves, even as she is skewering the misogynist posturing and rhetoric of the movement." Keith Tuma • Jacket

Caroline Manring 2River View

2011-12-09T00:00:00.000Z

"Is it any wonder that W. H. Auden grumbled that the Lidice massacre had inspired nothing more than 'versified trash'?" Joanna Bourke • TLS

Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl AGNI

2011-12-08T00:00:00.001Z

"While we who teach in M.F.A. programs can show our students how to write a strong pedagogy statement and stage mock interviews, the best job training we can give is to help students write a good book, cajole them into finishing and revising that book, and give them advice on getting it published." Elise Blackwell • Chronicle of Higher Education

Javier O. Huerta Three Candles

2011-12-07T00:00:00.001Z

"The editors have selected a large body of the shorter poems in Old English and printed their texts faced by new translations by what Michael Matto calls 'a panoply of voices', drawing on a considerable number of the leading current poets in English from both sides of the Atlantic. That is an achievement in itself: it is unusual to have transatlantic poets appearing in the same context at all; indeed they often hardly know of each other's existence." Bernard O'Donoghue • PN Review

Glyn Maxwell Poetry Review

2011-12-06T00:00:00.002Z

"[L]ike the Picasso of Gertrude Stein’s famous portrait, [John] Cage (who, incidentally, had had relationships with men long before he married Xenia) 'was always working.' His was not a struggle against anything as abstract or clichéd as 'an oppressively heteronormative society' or 'the sanctioned symbolic order' of patriarchy. Rather—and, one might say, more ambitiously,—he seemed to want nothing less than to transform the arts of his time. In this endeavor, there is now no doubt that he succeeded." Marjorie Perloff • LARB

Charles Bernstein esque

2011-12-05T00:00:00.000Z

"He was no follower of the regime, but, as the title of Cuomo’s investigation Career at the Cost of Compromise suggests and his investigation then shows, had certainly not sung songs 'which go against expectations.' His 'songs' had met them rather: numerous pieces of light, folksy entertainment, as demanded by the authorities, precisely to 'lull' the German audience 'asleep.'" Axel Vieregg on Gunter Eich • Berlin Review of Books

Paul Batchelor Manchester Review

2011-12-04T00:00:00.003Z

"Imitation in Dryden’s sense of the word meant an English version of a poem in Latin aimed at people who knew Latin—a sort of cover version. I use existing translations and commentaries and essays to tell me what’s going on; after that I’m on my own. That is why, when talking about War Music or Kings to myself, I call them my 'Homer poems.' But in public I call them 'an account,' a word I chose because it has a neutral, police-file air to it." Christopher Logue in conversation with Shusha Guppy • Paris Review

Alice Lyons Poetry

2011-12-03T00:00:00.001Z

"When the feed-mill co-operative where he worked was taken over by Amalgamated Farmers in 1991, Reading refused to wear the company overalls, and was promptly dismissed. Of course, overalls are all right for 'other' people, 'the gross sub-species and freaks, swilling at the bar,' say, that Reading writes about in 5x5x5x5x5." Ian Sansom • TLS

Austen Rosenfeld AGNI

2011-12-02T00:00:00.003Z

"We are out of the Commonwealth loop, [Jose] Dalisay asserts, and while American colonization gave us the English that we use for our writing, we all seem to have forgotten that, and we’re like the bastard children that appear at the family Christmas dinner. There are no favors to be had from our colonial fathers here, and it can only be difficult to deal with expectations." Katrina Stuart Santiago • GMA News Online

Tomaž Šalamun, trans. Michael Biggins Almost Island

2011-12-01T00:00:00.000Z

"Each separate version is a testament to the dictum that every translation is a single critical reading. Multiple translations speak to one another in a conversation as lively as if the translators were in one room, in one reading group, at one time." J. Kates on Anne Carson • Harvard Review

Douglas Dunn Guardian

2011-11-30T00:00:00.001Z

"[P]lagiarism is something different from appropriation for me. Plagiarism signals not making the reader aware of the source text; appropriation (again, for me), hinges on the relationship between the source text and the new text that appropriates the source text." Andy Frazee in conversation with Stephen Daniel Lewis • HTML Giant

Nikky Finney Poetry

2011-11-29T00:00:00.001Z

"So much the worse, [Philip] Larkin's enemies might say. Not only does Larkin behave badly. When he's caught out he uses his literary gifts to throw a consolatory film of aesthetic propriety over what was in fact nothing more than a shabby betrayal. What such a riposte would miss, however, is also the main revelation of this corpus of letters, namely that literature and literariness were, for Larkin and Monica, the ground and medium of their exceptional intimacy." David Womersly • Standpoint

Jane Yeh PN Review

2011-11-28T00:00:00.002Z

"In altering and fictionalizing a past period of his own artistic production, therefore making it both further from himself (through falsification) and nearer to himself (through recollection), [Ben] Lerner calls to mind fellow poet, Rilke, whose 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge similarly reimagines the travails of a fledgling alter ego--in both cases, importantly, a less promising and less capable persona than the 'authentic' poet-novelist." Laura Kolbe • Open Letters Monthly

Ben Fama Jubilat

2011-11-27T00:00:00.002Z

"They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest." Robert Hass • NYT

Barbara Hamby American Poetry Review

2011-11-26T00:00:00.002Z

"Leibowitz seems to think that poets deploy their poems primarily as evidence for biography." Daisy Fried • NYT

Ruth Stone Poetry

2011-11-25T00:00:00.004Z

"An audience member asked [Robert] Hass what it was like spending decades translating Milosz. He answered: 'Like being alive twice.'" Cynthia L Haven • TLS

Anthony Caleshu Conjunctions

2011-11-24T00:00:00.002Z

"He was, and he liked to play, the provincial versifier relishing his distance from “the literary world”; at the same time he liked to know about that world and to be known by it." Alan Jenkins on Peter Reading • TLS

Fanny Howe Conjunctions

2011-11-23T00:00:00.000Z

"The [French poetry] we read as new today looks more like the European poetry of 100 years ago than that of either 150 or 50 years ago, a fact based in a revitalized sense of poetry’s potential political role, or at least its obligation to try for one. While honoring Mallarmé’s dictum to give 'a purer meaning to the language of the tribe,' it more closely parallels a cultural project that began a little later, in the work of the early avant-garde writers at the turn of the previous century who used poetry and performance to register social resistance and to demand a different relationship between art and daily life." Cole Swensen • Aufgabe

Farnoosh Fathi and Louie Cordero High Chair

2011-11-22T00:00:00.000Z

"[A] writer might radically employ or engage tradition or 'the old.' Depending on who is doing the seeing, 'old' is sometimes quite unique and can even come across as 'unfamiliar' which might appear, to some writers, to be 'new.' Jill Magi • Aufgabe

Cole Swensen Almost Island

2011-11-21T00:00:00.003Z

"[N]o phrase better captures [Shane] McCrae’s ability to startle lyric’s most timeworn materials back to life than this one from 'Crows': 'spring the trees / Are raw with birds.'" Five microreviews from Boston Review

Peter Reading Qualm

2011-11-20T00:00:00.001Z

"In his own words, this combination of painstaking care and "ninety percent misanthropy" is the "slick prestidigital art of Not Caring/Hopelessly Caring"." Robert Potts on Peter Reading • Oxford Poetry

Brian Lucas Conjunctions

2011-11-19T00:00:00.000Z

"[C]urrently Lowell's cork is being swamped by proximity to Bishop's. In this case gender politics, the demise of grand public poetry, the triteness of much confessional writing and the centrality of post-modern poetry (with its linguistic playfulness) play their part in the changing fortunes." Tony Roberts on Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop • PN Review

Barbara Maloutas Aufgabe

2011-11-18T00:00:00.000Z

"This was slam poetry as our grandparents practiced it, or at least witnessed, in town plazas and similar public spaces where verses were interwoven with current topics and concerns of the day, engaging the community, long before electronic beats, B-boys, baseball caps, and jeans worn low on the hips arrived on the scene." Luis H. Francia • Inquirer

Ryoko Sekiguchi, trans. Sarah O'Brien Almost Island

2011-11-17T00:00:00.001Z

"We are, it seems, hopeless and inevitably subject to the limitations imposed by conditions that keep us engaged with the plane of immanence. So be it." Johanna Drucker • Aufgabe

Heather Christle Boston Review

2011-11-16T00:00:00.001Z

"Bloom sinks into disenchantment with the Disinformation Age. Vendler remains unconcerned or even oblivious to it. Garber sees risk and transformation, but she never seems clear which way the winds will blow. Perloff, though, is eager to sail off into a new century full of promise and opportunity." Joseph Campana on Marjorie Garber, Helen Vendler, Marjorie Perloff, and Harold Bloom • LARB

Brittany Cavallaro The Collagist

2011-11-15T00:00:00.002Z

"He had abandoned carpentry and returned to our town to become what he called a Destructionist. This meant quite literally that he took things apart. His plan, he said, was to deconstruct every object that he had ever built, starting with his house. But he stressed—he was at pains to stress—that taking something apart is in fact far more difficult than putting something together. The hard part, he said, was figuring out where one object ends and the other begins. You have to know where to stop. And to illustrate this point he took a pocketknife out of his coat and brought the blade to his wrist." Joseph Cardinale • Conjunctions

Sarah Riggs Conjunctions

2011-11-14T00:00:00.001Z

"Of course, no single achievement of George’s matches John’s in any imaginable way. These aren’t the versatile James brothers, William and Henry, or the collaborating Grimms or Wrights. John [Keats] wrote a dozen of the finest lyrics in the English language, including the great odes on the Grecian urn and the nightingale and melancholy, which arrived in a sustained flurry during the spring of 1819. And George? George built a steam-powered sawmill near Beargrass Creek in Louisville." Christopher Benfey • NYT

Lynn Jenner Turbine

2011-11-13T00:00:00.000Z

"Lines collect for years, but once in a while they discover that other lines are sexy and, well, the poems may come from that sort of a relationship. If I am lucky. Which isn't often. But one has to have faith." Ilya Kaminsky • Poets.org

Allan Popa, trans. Jose Perez Beduya, Jose Edmundo Ocampo Reyes, and Marc Gaba Asymptote

2011-11-12T00:00:00.002Z

"You end the book thinking that if this is poetry, it's a trivial art." David Sexton on Carol Ann Duffy • Evening Standard "Duffy is a popular poet, with the emphasis firmly on the poetry, not the popularity. She has us listen in to the music of the quotidian, develops our litmus for lies." Liz Lochead • Guardian

Zosimo Quibilan Jr Asia Writes

2011-11-11T00:00:00.000Z

"Eschewing both out-there lyricism and the vague contentless melodrama common to much contemporary poetry, O'Donoghue relies on more subtle textural effects. In doing so, he appears to obey Elizabeth Bishop's advice that one shouldn't take 'the catastrophic way out' when writing a poem." Vidyan Ravinthiran • Tower Poetry

Rita Ann Higgins Manchester Review

2011-11-10T00:00:00.008Z

"Williams’s achievement as a writer ought to feel as assured or as controversial as Byron’s or Tennyson’s, but Leibowitz has inherited a good dose of Williams’s defensiveness, and, as his discussion of the Armory Show suggests, 'Something Urgent I Have to Say to You' relies heavily on Williams’s retrospective comments about the life and work, often leaving the more interestingly conflicted historical record untouched." James Longenbach • The Nation

Sarah Riggs Reading Between A&B

2011-11-09T00:00:00.001Z

"The Hudson house is also, if you look at the photographs, very French. The look and feel is partly what one might expect a rich French burgher to buy for his house in the 1890s if he were ever so slightly Bonapartist-reactionary. It looks like the kind of house that Rimbaud dreamed of escaping. To render Rimbaud ever so slightly fustian, so minutely dusty and Jamesian-convenable, is to enhouse the wanderer again, to retrofit the language of adolescence." Adam Piette on John Ashbery's translation of Arthur Rimbaud • Blackbox Manifold

Khin Aung Aye, trans. James Byrne and ko ko thett Asymptote

2011-11-08T00:00:00.001Z

"I think I came to a serious attitude towards poetry by a side path, getting a great colourful experience in this way." Anna Auziņa in conversation with SJ Fowler • 3:AM

Nachoem M. Wijnberg, trans. David Colmer Green Integer Review

2011-11-07T00:00:00.002Z

"With Margaret’s death, her financial provision for Pound ceased: he was back among the anxieties of Grub Street, 'the old ring-around with wire-pulling concealed,' as he called it. Within a few months he was writing to Homer: 'I am in my "last ditch" and I want you, if you can, to stand to the guns. My patron is dead—has been for some months.' 'My finances have gone to smash,' he told his mother." Denis Donoghue • New Criterion

Karl Marx, trans. Keston Sutherland Blackbox Manifold

2011-11-06T00:00:00.004Z

"I find it hard to read without thinking of Armitage’s startlingly good ‘You May Turn Over and Begin...’; also coupletted, also taking its relatively dry opening and wandering off to come hurtling back to its opening now laden with massive emotional freight (although Armitage’s girl being tall and spindly rather than big-toothed)." Joey Connolly on Tom Warner • Kaffeeklatsch

Michael Symmons Roberts MLF (scroll down)

2011-11-05T00:00:00.003Z

"I feel sorry for this highly-educated biographer, a man of great faith, as he tries to understand his poet. A provincial poet will always choose the most unreasonable position. It is a matter of survival. An unreasonable position is the best vantage point from which a writer can assess the veracity of his critics and the temperature of his nation." Thomas McCarthy • Irish Examiner

Ashleigh Lambert Anti-

2011-11-04T00:00:00.002Z

"Against the increasing threats to the planet, a capitalism astray, and continuing historical debilities, such geniality proffers its steady and wonderful appeal." Steven Matthews on Derek Mahon and Geoffrey Hill • Poetry Review (pdf)