The present survey is provisional and intended to serve as only the merest introduction to a vast and extraordinarily complex field, one that commands broad, ongoing attention.… continue reading...
mong literary arts, poetry places the greatest emphasis on the organization of the musical effects of language: rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and onomatopoeia, along with such elements as ambiguity, and even exuberant nonsense.… continue reading...
One of several enticements of the internet for a literary magazine, as for any enterprise, is the ease with which information may be conveyed, stored, and distributed.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
In his enormous Pulitzer Prize-winning account, Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer describes the kaleidoscopic tumult and turmoil of the 1967 march on the Pentagon to protest American involvement in Vietnam.… continue reading...
Interviewer’s note: William DeWitt Snodgrass is commonly credited with inaugurating the “confessional” era in American poetry in 1959 with his first collection, Heart’s Needle. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and there is evidence that it influenced Robert Lowell’s own pioneering collection Life Studies.… continue reading...
An Interview with X. J. KennedyBy: Ernest Hilbert
X. J. Kennedy was born in Dover, NJ in 1929, the son of a boiler factory timekeeper.… continue reading...
Just as Ben Jonson bore the unfortunate fate of living in what would become known as the “Age of Shakespeare,” Louis MacNeice lives in the long shadow thrown by his exact contemporary, W.H.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Ooga Booga: Poems by Frederick Seidel. FSG, 2006. 112 pp.
Glamour-fueled magazines, like New York, do not characteristically devote much ink to poets.… continue reading...
Interviewer’s note: X.J. Kennedy has written that Erica Dawson “is the most exciting younger poet I’ve seen in years. What drive and verve! Even in lines under tight control, she can sound reckless.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Books Discussed:
The Apple That Astonished Paris by Billy Collins. University of Arkansas Press, 1988.
Questions About Angels by Billy Collins.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. USA $24.00, Canada $37.00
Anne Carson’s most recent collection, Men in the Off Hours, is a conspicuous departure from the uniform tone and patient psychological exploration of her previous book, Autobiography of Red, which, for all its intellectual elegance, was essentially a bildungsroman, a formational novel in verse.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Americana by John Updike. Knopf, US $23. 95 pages.
John Updike balances upon, and in many ways defines, the center of the beam in American literature.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
It is a peculiar pleasure to hear Anne Sexton read her poems, though her parched agony carries through and occasionally sends a shiver down the spine.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Voice of the Poet: Five American Women
Gertrude Stein, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Muriel Rukeyser
Gertrude Stein is the odd woman out in this collection, her fame owing as it does to a broad array of achievements.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
James Merrill is usually imagined as a genteel lyric poet who lived a genteel lyrical life, engaged by purely domestic concerns, whether in New England or Greece, while turning out some of the most balanced and swiftly canonical American poems of the century.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
John Ashbery has often been described as the most important poet writing in English today. Even if this cannot be said with any great deal of enthusiasm, one may relent and admit that he is certainly the most influential poet to cast seeds on American soil for some time.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
In 1962, as CIA analysts stood over grainy photographs of what they believed to be Russian missile bases in Cuba, Elizabeth Bishop wrote in her poem ‘Sandpiper’ of the sea receding, where “(no detail too small) the Atlantic drains / rapidly backwards and downwards.”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Few twentieth-century poets in English have achieved such lofty heights of fame or been surrounded by such cumbrous shrouds of legend as Sylvia Plath.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Randall Jarrell’s poetry and criticism have lately experienced individual resurgences. Even his children’s books, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, have proven very popular.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
W. H. Auden is ordinarily depicted as the leading, in fact the best-loved, member of his generation of English poets, the generation falling between the airy heights of T.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Thoughtful readers of poetry are attuned to the musical subtleties of the human voice. These qualities shape the poetry, and most poetry—purely optical or purposely discordant linguistic experiments notwithstanding—should be heard, either as an acoustic mental image, when read silently, or spoken aloud.… continue reading...
I first wrote about Franz Wright’s poetry while working as poetry editor of Random House’s online magazine, Bold Type. Upon publication of his first book with Knopf, The Beforelife, I contacted him for an interview.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
It will be frequently remarked elsewhere that the past year saw many fine poets cross the bar, but only one of them devoted huge energies to poems about young men crossing barroom floors.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
On the Uses of the New Online Media
… continue reading...We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror. – Marshall McLuhan
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Orchards of Syon by Geoffrey Hill. Counterpoint Press, 2002.
Geoffrey Hill is so categorically admired by those who read him regularly (and they do not comprise a great horde) that it seems simply a matter of time before one will begin to hear of a “Hillian corpus” as one sometimes hears of an “Aristophanic corpus”.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
An Introduction to the Uses of Voice Recording in New Electronic Formats
The musical qualities of the spoken voice are thought by many to be the essence of poetry, and it remains true that most poetry is intended to be heard, either as an acoustic mental image or when spoken aloud.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
The Throne of Labdacus by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001
I.
At the height of its rather muted publicity, the new formalism movement-proclaimed by Dana Gioia in the 1980s, and laid out in Linnaean proportions by Mark Jarman and David Mason in Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism-was met with derision by many American poets and with confusion by European poets, few of whom had strayed any great distance from the formal traditions of their forebears.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins.
Among the many impediments to which contemporary poets much admit, Dana Gioia wrote in his vital essay “Can Poetry Matter?”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Stephen Spender’s World Within World is as much a reconsideration, a critique, of the art of autobiography as it is an autobiography.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
The Beat Hotel by Barry Miles. Grove Press. 294 pages. $24.95.
The byronic images and locales of La Boheme, Giacomo Puccini’s nineteenth-century depiction of classically starving artists in Paris’s Latin Quarter, have come to dominate, rather predictably, portrayals of young artists, writers, and singers: whiskered rogues in whose unwashed ears the muses Aoide, Erato, and very often Melpomene whisper.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Collected Poems by James Merrill. Knopf, 2001.
Tribute to James Merrill, April 10, 2001, sponsored by The New School Writing Program & the Academy of American Poets.… continue reading...
