Of all the literary scenes
Saddest this sight to me:
The graves of little magazines
Who died to make verse free.
— Keith Preston
It is impossible to tell the story of modern American poetry without examining the role of little magazines.… continue reading...
David Kalstone, a longtime professor of English at Rutgers University and, prior to that, at Harvard, was one of James Merrill’s closest friends. An expert on Sir Philip Sidney, Kalstone extensively studied 20th-century Americans as well; his second book Five Temperaments (1977) included a chapter on Merrill along with Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery.… continue reading...
“The Broken Home” is a sequence of seven sonnets that appeared in Merrill’s 1966 volume Nights and Days. The sonnets are connected by imagery, themes and autobiography, concerning, as they do, two central issues: the trauma of Merrill’s parents’ divorce and the poet’s own incomplete or “broken” childless home.… continue reading...
The young James Merrill first saw Greece in 1950 as part of a two-and-a-half-year long European tour, a trip he would later detail in his memoir A Different Person.… continue reading...
James Merrill’s final book of poems, A Scattering of Salts, was written in his last years as his health was in steady decline after having been diagnosed with HIV.… continue reading...
Merrill scholarship has been undergoing a sea change, apparently mirroring a larger societal change. What among scholars even in the 1990s could but delicately speak its name, now does so frankly.… continue reading...
James Merrill has given us the birth-myth of his poem, “Losing the Marbles.” After decades of spending his winter months in Athens, Greece, Merrill wintered instead in Key West, where, in 1985,
… continue reading...“… we were talking about memory lapses, a topic increasingly relevant to everyone present.
In “Investiture at Cecconi’s,” James Merrill weaves a beautiful, sapphic fabric whose warp and weft intertwine chiaroscuro threads of fate, epiphany, beauty, and death as the expression of an initiation into the realm of living with and dying from AIDS.… continue reading...
The Book of Ephraim is a very “literary” work and perhaps never more so than in its Venetian sections (V and W). It is my contention that Section V (the letter V, not the Roman numeral) constitutes not only a major turning-point in the work, but also a significant declaration of Merrill’s literary aims.… continue reading...
“Family week at Oracle Ranch” is a portrait of dysfunction. It’s a poem written later in Merrill’s life, appearing in his final book, A Scattering of Salts, published by Knopf in 1995, the same year that Merrill died (February 6, 1995).… continue reading...
James Merrill is one of those poets whom everybody (well, everybody in the literary world) knows but whom few have read—or, at least, few have read at length or in depth.… continue reading...
I teach Hardy every other year in my “Modern British Poetry“ course at Wells College, and this year I decided to use “The Darkling Thrush” to introduce his work to students, many of whom had not read him before.… continue reading...
Click here (and scroll to the bottom of the page) to read the poem sequence.
I’d like to start by making a claim that I have recently asserted elsewhere: The lyric poem is fundamentally elegiac.… continue reading...
On April 15, 1912, on her maiden voyage, the British steamer Titanic, the world’s largest and most luxurious ship, struck an iceberg in mid-Atlantic and sank.… continue reading...
… continue reading...“Effulgent” by David M. Katz
Part seemed she of the effulgent thought —“Her Initials,” Thomas Hardy
Glitter, brilliance, candor, dazzle;
Luster, splendor, lambent lightness;
She evokes a lucid ghazal
All shot through with flashing brightness:
Of those words, he chose “effulgent.”
How can you account for the love you have for a favorite poem? One way is simply to say that it sparks personal associations for you.… continue reading...
When beginning to think about the poem “During Wind and Rain” by Thomas Hardy, I thought it might be useful to go back for some context to the old pessimist Yvor Winters, who always had provocative things to say about form. … continue reading...
Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Last Signal” is one of his finest elegies. That is already saying a good deal, since a great many of his poems could be defined as elegiac in tone, if not actually in strict form.… continue reading...
Thomas Hardy is still far better known as a novelist than he is as a poet. Although certain poems have lodged themselves where, as Frost put it, they will be hard to get rid of, there is still a widespread conviction that much of his poetry is either awkward, difficult or just downright bad.… continue reading...
An excerpt from “The Last of the Dandies”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1862
Article unsigned
“Who is Captain Gronow?”
He is the last of the “Dandies” of the Regency of George IV.;… continue reading...
Of all the modern poets of France who claimed noble birth—and many did so, by inserting de before their last name as a literary and social affectation—only two indisputably had that right: Villiers de L’isle-Adam and Robert de Montesquiou.… continue reading...
A section of “Beau Brummell” from Miscellaneous Works Volume I: Habits and Men by John Doran (1857)
… continue reading...I scorn to crowd among the muddy throng
Of the rank multitude, whose thicken’d breath
(Like to condensed fogs) do choke the beauty
Which else would dwell in every kingdom’s cheek.
We look upon Beau Brummell as the greatest of small wits. Indeed, he may in this respect be considered, as Cowley says of Pindar as “a species alone,” and as forming a class by himself.… continue reading...
“Beau Brummell” from Eccentric Personages by W. Russell (1864)
It is a solemn truth that every death-bed is the final scene of a great tragedy, though the death be a beggar’s, the bed one of straw.… continue reading...
An Excerpt from Pelham: Or the Adventures of a Gentleman by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1828)
1.) Do not require your dress so much to fit, as to adorn you.… continue reading...
It is not until the reign of that frustrated artist and unsurpassed egotist, Nero, that we again recognize the true dandy, so insolent in repose, embodied in the fragmentary figure of Gaius Petronius (Arbiter).… continue reading...
The first literary dandy of whom we still have record was Plato—who was unquestionably the greatest “exquisite” of his day. This will strike most modern readers as astonishing or inconceivable but it is neither for those who know their Greek.… continue reading...
When was man first freed from the drudgery of earning his income? And who was the first to dedicate himself to the art of living well?… continue reading...
Last July, a distinguished group of poets who are also critics gathered at Western State College of Colorado, in Gunnison, for the Second Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism.… continue reading...
Those who condemn form in poetry are often given to venting their wrath upon…received forms, and often chiefly on the grounds that they coerce the mind, limit the imagination, force language with Procrustean barbarity into set molds.… continue reading...
When I was seventeen years old and barely aware of poetry, with no idea what good poetry might be, or even what if anything might please me, a friend, just back from his English class, rushed breathlessly into my room at boarding school, book in hand, and cried, “Listen to this!”… continue reading...
After his reading, the poet was approached by a tearful woman. She thanked him for the poem about his brother who had died. “My brother died recently,” she said, “and I sympathize with your feelings about your brother’s death.”… continue reading...
Stand-up comedian Tony Campanelli confessed Monday to the Feb. 26 killing of 180 comedy-club patrons during a performance at Crack-Ups in Royal Oak. . . .… continue reading...
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...
Reviewed: Ziggurat by Peter Balakian. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Peter Balakian’s poetry is a “strange brew of wind and light” distilled to one degree or another from primal trauma.… continue reading...
1. The Tyranny of Narrative
A simple Google search for the phrase “against narrative” will lead you to any number of websites in which someone declares that narrative is tyranny of some sort.… continue reading...
1. MAKING SOUL
Two days after my birth I arrived at my grandparents’ stone house on the plains. Around us ripe wheat spread across swaying prairie, and words rose from the fields offering themselves to my grandparents’ mouths by way of the King James Bible.… continue reading...
Robert Benchley, the actor, critic and member of the Algonquin Wits, once quipped that “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.” … continue reading...
– Paul Valéry
“Thought tends to collect in pools.”
– Wallace Stevens
Ordinary readers, literary editors, and some English professors confront an inescapable question of judgment: In principle, is it possible, faced with an overwhelming body of work in print, to cull out excellent poems in the way one can cull out fine diamonds or superb soufflés?… continue reading...
Time was when there was too much criticism around. Randall Jarrell thought so, when, in the early Fifties, he pronounced it “the bane of our age.”… continue reading...
The six papers which will appear this week in the CPR were all delivered on July 31, 2010, at the first annual Western State College Seminar on Poetry Criticism, in Gunnison, Colorado. … continue reading...
While far from being the most ambitious and successful poem in The Whitsun Weddings, “Broadcast” seems to me in many ways among the most essentially Larkinesque of Philip Larkin’s poems, and at the same time the most uncharacteristically romantic.… continue reading...
Philip Larkin’s 1964 volume, The Whitsun Weddings, contains two poems describing train-journeys. One of them is the volume’s title-poem and is one of the most famous (and best-loved) poems in English since the Second World War; it has been said that with this work he brought a whole new English landscape into poetry.… continue reading...
Painting the House by Bibhu Padhi. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. 1999. 79 pp.
In Indian English poetry Bibhu Padhi belongs to the second generation of post-Independence poets.… continue reading...
Bare Face by Jayanta Mahapatra. Kottayam: DC Books (India), 2000. $7.95.
As Reviewed By: Rabindra K. Swain
Today, when India is known abroad more for her fiction than her poetry, Jayanta Mahapatra’s sixteenth volume, Bare Face, arrives.… continue reading...
Uncollected Poems and Prose by A. K. Ramanujan. Edited by Molly Daniels-Ramanujan and Keith Harrison. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
As Reviewed By: Rabindra K.… continue reading...
Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets, edited by Ranjit Hoskote. Viking (New Delhi) 2002. 148 pages. 195 Rupees.
As Reviewed By: Rabindra K. Swain
“For a time,” warns Michael Roberts in his introduction to the first edition of the influential anthology The Faber Book of Modern Verse, “the false poem may be more popular than the true one could have been.”… continue reading...
The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton. FSG, 852 pages. $40
By: Anthony Moore
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (1917-1977) came into the world high on the social ladder.… continue reading...
An inadequate but serviceable list
As Compiled By: Preston Merchant
Only the Soul Knows How to Sing: Selections from Kamala Das
Das stopped writing poetry recently after converting to Islam, though she had been called “the first Hindu woman to write honestly about sexual feelings and love.” … continue reading...
The Oxford India Ramanujan, edited by Molly Daniels-Ramanujan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004)
As Reviewed By: Preston Merchant
It was a singular moment in the history of Indian letters when A.… continue reading...
Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)
By: Preston Merchant
After Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001, of brain cancer, Tehelka, an Indian website, presented an online tribute by his friends and admirers.… 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...
I have two of Philip Larkin’s poems by heart—“Sad Steps” and “Aubade”—though I admire many more, and it was while reciting the former poem silently to myself during a particularly boring meeting that I noticed a number of things for the first time, most of them related in one way or another to the poet’s use of adjectives:
… continue reading...Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
For those familiar with Philip Larkin’s work, the title of this short essay will seem to offer a juxtaposition so improbable as to be laugh-out-loud funny-rather like that old joke staple, the tiny book titled German Humor, or the admittedly unlikely prospect of a panel at a New Formalist conference on “The Achievement of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E Poets.”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Dan Brown
Tom Disch’s first book of poems in ten years has the heft you’d expect of a collection so long in preparation: eighty poems spanning almost 150 long-format pages.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ben Downing
It was his sonnet “A Bookmark” that first caught my attention. “Four years ago I started reading Proust,” the poem begins, and goes on to skewer Remembrance of Things Past and its mincing narrator-“Oh, what a slimy sort he must have been- / So weak, so sweetly poisonous, so fey!”-with… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Eric Ormsby
It takes a brave poet these days to praise the beauties of obesity.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
“A spiritual life doesn’t require taking Holy Orders, only a decision to submit to a lifelong discipline.”
— Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008
Few American poet-critics since Edgar Allan Poe have brought a practitioner’s knowledge of writing genre fiction to the service of poetry reviewing.… continue reading...
Thomas M. Disch. The Priest: A Gothic Romance. Alfred A. Knopf 1995. 352 pp.
Tom Disch. Dark Verses & Light. The Johns Hopkins University Press 1991.… 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...
Reviewed By: David Mason
Here it is, folks, almost free of charge-another taxonomical declaration!… continue reading...
Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
Read: X. J. Kennedy’s “The Pacifier”
It’s rare nowadays to find maxims and adages embedded in poems, though verses were once a common and accepted way of transmitting received wisdom.… continue reading...
Reviewed By: Catherine Tufariello
… continue reading...I like poems where you don’t really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them.
Read: X. J. Kennedy and KidLit
I first heard X. J. Kennedy read in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I was in a lecture hall at the local university, weary and dispirited from an overdose of “serious” poetry readings, and I glanced at the doorway, deliberating on whether or not I should make my escape to the local bar.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Jack Foley
Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems. Edited by Charles Bernstein. American Poets Project/The Library of America, 2006.
… continue reading...In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find.
As Reviewed By: Preston Merchant
When Anthony Hecht first came to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference to teach a summer workshop in the early 1990’s, one of his students was particularly eager to meet him.… continue reading...
Travel Writing and the Canon
Like many odd literary creatures from the British 1930’s, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland (1936) is referred to more frequently as a representative period piece than as an achieved work of art.… 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...
Interview By: Sunil Iyengar
Jon Stallworthy’s blood quickened after a poetry reading he gave earlier this year, not because he admired his own recitative powers, but because of something an audience member told him.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Maria Johnston
In a note on Louis MacNeice’s poetry penned in 1964, Louise Bogan observed that, “the Collected Poems 1925-1948 should, although not so arranged, be read in chronological order, for it is an added pleasure to watch the opening out of a true lyric gift, and of one so clearly illustrative of the subtle shifts and adjustments that have occurred within English poetic tradition during this century.”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Katy Evans-Bush
In 1963, after Louis MacNeice’s premature death of pneumonia, Philip Larkin wrote that “his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the news-boys were shouting .… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: John Drexel
… continue reading...“The Sunlight on the Garden” by Louis MacNeice
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
New Collected Poems by W. S. Graham. Edited by Matthew Francis, with a foreword by Douglas Dunn. Faber & Faber, 2005
What is the language using us for?
As Reviewed By: Alfred Corn
Myths about poetry and its production resist rational criticism, and we may be wasting our time trying to deconstruct the fable that English-language poetry has unfolded under what might be called a presiding genius, a directive energy moving from place to place at different points in history.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Maria Johnston
Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon. Faber, £14.95, 107 pp.
Paul Muldoon’s tenth poetry collection Horse Latitudes arrived at the close of 2006 together with hisThe End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry, a collection of lectures delivered during his time as Professor of Poetry at Oxford.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
The Long Home by Christian Wiman. Story Line Press, 1998.
Hard Night by Christian Wiman. Copper Canyon Press, 2005.
When the mantle of Poetry editor descended on the 37-year-old Christian Wiman in 2003, many a poet-critic burned with envy.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Why Speak? by Nathaniel Bellows. W.W. Norton, 2007. 110 pages.
Why speak? A good question. But this debut collection provokes more specific questions: In what way are these poems not short, short, stories?… 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...
As Reviewed By: Andrew Goodspeed
John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by Kevin Young. Library of America, 2004.
Kevin Young’s admirable edition of John Berryman’s verse (for the Library of America’s American Poets Project) meets the primary expectations readers may bring to a new edition of Berryman’s selected poetry.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Andrew Goodspeed
Rhinoceros by Kevin Ducey. American Poetry Review. $23.00
Kevin Ducey’s great strength is his daring. He frequently appears silly, he risks silliness in his work, and this silliness sometimes succeeds admirably.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Andrew Goodspeed
There is no key to Samuel Beckett’s poetry. It is a body of work that can be as oblique, resistant, and complex to the scholar as it is to a novice reader.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Daniel Bosch
It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving, and as the Writing Studio at Walnut Hill’s recent visit to the Geraldine R.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Jack Foley
Madonna Septet by Ivan Argüelles. Potes & Poets Press: 2000.
Musica Humana by Ilya Kaminsky. Chapiteau Press: 2002.
After by Jane Hirshfield.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Jack Foley
Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics. Edited by Robert Kimball. American Poets Project/The Library of America, 2006.
… continue reading...If I were Lord Byron,
I’d write you, sweet siren,
A poem inspirin’…
A killer-dilleroo!
As Reviewed By: Maria Johnston
The Sea Cabinet by Caitríona O’ Reilly. Bloodaxe, £7.95, 61 pp.
… continue reading...I am rereading Moby Dick in preparation for the exam deluge tomorrow-am whelmed and wondrous at the swimming Biblical & craggy Shakespearean cadences, the rich & lustrous & fragrant recreation of spermaceti, ambergris-miracle, marvel, the ton-thunderous leviathan.
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
A Review of “Ezra Pound in His Time and Beyond: The Influence of Ezra Pound on Twentieth-Century Poetry.” Special Collections Exhibit, University of Delaware Library, curated by Jesse Rossa; catalogue published by the University of Delaware Library.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Read “District and Circle” here at The Times Online
Seamus Heaney has become so institutionalized that it is virtually impossible for him ever to reclaim outsider status.… continue reading...
Robert Frost’s two-and-a-half year sojourn in England (1912-1915) made him as a poet. After a long apprenticeship in New Hampshire, he placed his first book, A Boy’s Will, with a London publisher, thrilled the Georgian poets with his rustic New England facade, met W.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Joan Houlihan
The To Sound by Eric Baus (Verse Press, 2004)
Hat on the Bed by Christine Scanlon (Barrow Street Press, 2005)
Figment by Rebecca Wolff (Norton, 2004)
The lag time between the appearance of an original, culturally significant art form and the culture’s ability to apprehend it has a long, well-documented history.… 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...
New British Poetry. Edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic. Graywolf Press, 2004. Paper: $16.00.
“Anthologies provide the easiest access for American readers into contemporary British poetry, and the lack of reliable contemporary anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic may account for a large part of the apathy and misunderstanding between the two literatures,” wrote Dana Gioia some twenty years ago (in the title piece of Barrier of a Common Language, his recent collection of essays and reviews).
As Reviewed By: Christopher Bakken
Poets-authoritative as they are on Eros and Thanatos, ether and effulgence-are rarely the specialists we turn to when, being Americans, we long to investigate work, that thing at the bedrock of our particular cultural expertise.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Aaron Baker
Civil unrest, wars, and insurgencies rage around the globe, but for most of us, comfortably ensconced in some version of a Western lifestyle (a “lifestyle” itself being one of our consumer choices), this news, like that of distant weather, almost always takes place on the level of heady abstraction.… continue reading...
Barrier of a Common Language: An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry by Dana Gioia. University of Michigan Press, 2003. Paper: $16.95
… continue reading...Although the notion is rarely articulated openly, there is a tacit assumption in most anthologies and criticism [in the United States] that in the past century American poetry-vigorous, innovative, and bold-decisively vanquished its safe, tired, and tame British counterpart….
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. 71 pages.
The trick of transparency, like all sleight of hand, does not admit close scrutiny.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Fourteen On Form: Conversations with Poets by William Baer. University Press of Mississippi. 265 pages.
The liveliest moment in William Baer’s collection of table-talk occurs in an interview with Douglas Dunn at St.… 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...
(The first in a series on obscure authors and their work.)
As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis
The Count Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was born in 1838, and it is not extravagant to assert that his destiny was determined by his birth.… continue reading...
A few years ago, for the brief span of a few classes, I attended a poetry workshop class at Boston University. Though I was not formally enrolled in the class, the teacher had generously invited me to attend-and since the teacher was one of the great living masters of the art I accepted, though it necessitated my commuting between California and Massachusetts for several months.… continue reading...
“The letter that is sent is never the letter that is received.” —Lacan
As Reviewed By: Daniel Bosch
Rilke never held a teaching post. We have no cache of syllabi, no workshop guidelines, and though in his letters he expressed quite a lot of readerly enthusiasm, there is no definitive Rilkean reading list, no Rilkean curriculum.… continue reading...
Ariel: The Restored Edition by Sylvia Plath. HarperCollins. 240 pages. $24.95
As Reviewed By: Carol Bere
Sylvia Plath may have passed through the doors of B.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Carol Bere
Seamus Heaney is probably the most universally known Irish poet today.… continue reading...
Voluntary Servitude by Mark Wunderlich. Graywolf Press, 2004.
A Companion for Owls by Maurice Manning. Harcourt, 2004.
shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities by Olena Kalytiak Davis.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
I
Thumbing at leisure through Donald Justice’s poems, one encounters several worthy candidates for an imagined memorial reading.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: James Rother
Just barely octogenarian (but grown wispy), Hugh Kenner, like the Romantic correspondent breeze he so adamantly eschewed in the prolonged swath through modernist studies he cut like a mighty wind, slipped away a year ago this past month, a legend diminished but certainly not obscured by the marginalizations heaped upon him in recent years.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
For years I resisted the temptation to sum up Anthony Hecht’s work as a single, completed whole.… 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: Katy Evans-Bush
… continue reading...Imagine growing up in a society where one’s first and only experience of music occurred in a schoolroom, where the beauty of music was meticulously analysed and explained to you and where you were judged by your ability to explain it in turn.
As Reviewed By: Christopher Bakken
In Letters from an American Farmer, frontier agrarian J. Hector St. John de Crevècoeur posits that
… continue reading...Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow.
Here
in the dusty malarial lanes
of Cuttack where years have slowly lost their secrets
they wander
in these lanes nicked by intrigue and rain
and the unseen hands of gods
in front of a garish temple of the simian Hanuman
along river banks splattered with excreta and dung
in the crowded market square among rotting tomatoes
fish-scales and the moist warm odour of bananas and piss
passing by the big-breasted, hard-eyed young whores
who frequent the empty space behind the local cinema
by the Town Hall where corrupt politicians still
go on delivering their pre-election speeches
and on the high road above the town’s burning-ground
from which gluttonous tan smoke floats up
in the breeze, smacking of scorched marrow and doubt.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: J. S. Renau
I should begin by saying that, concerning the education of the poet, the special focus for this issue of CPR, I am deeply conflicted.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Marc Pietrzykowski
I. Forget About Marketing
F. T. Marinetti’s publication of the Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro on Feb. 20, 1909, managed to shock its readers by melding a traditional form-the individual or collaborative statement of disputation against an orthodoxy-with the language of Revolution, or, as it was later called, Marketing:
… continue reading...“Look at us!
As Interviewed By: Joan Houlihan
Brown University, University of Iowa, early to mid-90’s
1. What did you learn in your MFA studies that has advanced your development as a poet-and that you believe you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere?… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Joan Houlihan
In the dark age of poetry, the pre-MFA era, when poets were untethered to a clear identity, often unhinged, and wandering loose in a society inimical to their aims, they were forced to brood in out-of-the-way cafés and corners, bringing forth from their painful rubbings against society’s strictures their secret image-pearls without benefit of community or support of other pearl-producers.… continue reading...
Conducted by: Garrick Davis
Interviewer’s Note: This year, a new website was launched in the National Poetry Month of April-not to publish poetry or fiction, but to examine the ethics of the poetry world.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Third Edition), edited by Jahan Ramazani.
… continue reading...Give me a look, give me a face
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free;
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all th’adulteries of art.
As Reviewed By: Joan Houlihan
Lunch, by D.A. Powell. Wesleyan University Press, 2000. 62 pages. paper, $12.95
Tea, by D.A. Powell. Wesleyan University Press, 1998.… 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: Anthony Moore
As Reviewed By: Preston Merchant
It was a singular moment in the history of Indian letters when A.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ravi Shankar
The world’s largest secular democracy has been exporting its letters in English for a few literary generations, but in the wake of a few luminaries-Rabindranath Tagore or more recently, Arundhati Roy-many strident, lyrical voices have gone unrecognized (after all, this wave of Indian poets and novelists, for all the hype, is still but a ripple in publishing in terms of sheer numbers).… continue reading...
As Interviewed By: Rabindra Swain
& Preston Merchant
Jayanta Mahapatra was born in 1928 in Cuttack, in the Indian state of Orissa. Trained as a scientist, he taught college physics for thirty-six years.… continue reading...
As Compiled By: Preston Merchant[private]
Only the Soul Knows How to Sing: Selections from Kamala Das
Das stopped writing poetry recently after converting to Islam, though she had been called “the first Hindu woman to write honestly about sexual feelings and love.”… continue reading...
Reviewed: The Cantos by Ezra Pound (Fourth Collected edition). Faber and Faber, 1987.
A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Carroll F. Terrell. University of California Press, 1980.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Alfred Corn
Oxfordshire: A contingent of scholars from the University of Tulsa has come to Wroxton Abbey, near Banbury, to spend a month in relative seclusion while working on private projects and participating in a series of seminars designed to foster interdepartmental collegiality.… continue reading...
Red Sauce, Whiskey & Snow. FSG, 1996.
Green Sees Things in Waves. FSG, 1999.
Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems 1975-1990. FSG, 2000.
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep.… continue reading...
The Calligraphy Shop by Ben Downing. Zoo Press, 2003. Paper, $14.95. 46 pages.
The Hidden Model by David Yezzi. Triquarterly Books/Northwestern, 2003. Hardcover $39.95; paper, $11.95.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Christopher Bakken
In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground…
-William Wordsworth
More than a decade ago, over lunch with a mentor, I was discussing a sonnet sequence I’d been torturing myself and my friends with for months.… continue reading...
As Interviewed By: Christopher Bakken
Interviewer’s Note: Since 1973, Herbert Leibowitz has edited Parnassus: Poetry in Review, maintaining (along with his famously high standards) a publication that has proven essential to contemporary poetry and to those who read and write it.… continue reading...
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
As Reviewed By: Aaron Baker
“The Return of Robert Lowell,” James Fenton titled his recent essay in The New York Review of Books, which invites the question-but where ever did Lowell go?… continue reading...
Crux: The Letters of James Dickey edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman. Knopf, 1999.
James Dickey: The World as a Lie by Henry Hart.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Aaron Baker
“The Return of Robert Lowell,” James Fenton titled his recent essay in The New York Review of Books, which invites the question-but where ever did Lowell go?… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Christopher Bakken
In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground…
-William Wordsworth
More than a decade ago, over lunch with a mentor, I was discussing a sonnet sequence I’d been torturing myself and my friends with for months.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
As Reviewed By: James Rother
Three years ago the Collected Poems everyone was talking about was J.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Can Poetry Matter? by Dana Gioia. 10th anniversary edition. Graywolf Press, 2003.
I.
In an introductory note to his first poetry collection, The Rage for the Lost Penny (1940), Randall Jarrell declares: “‘Modern’ poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become.”… continue reading...
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: Brian Henry
The Seven Ages by Louise Glück. Ecco/HarperCollins, $23 cloth. 68 pgs.
Very few lives are interesting, and even fewer are sufficiently interesting to spawn nine books of autobiographical poetry.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Brian Henry
Tremolo by Spencer Short. HarperCollins Perennial, 2001. $13 (paper).
Selected by Billy Collins as a winner in the National Poetry Series competition.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Omaar Hena
The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Helen Vendler. Belknap Press, 1997. $37.39 paperback. 692 pages.
Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets first appeared in 1997 and then in paperback two years later.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: J. K. Halligan
The Invasion Handbook by Tom Paulin. Faber & Faber, 2002.
In the poem “Surveillances”, from his second collection, The Strange Museum (1980), Tom Paulin addressed the anonymous inhabitants of Northern Ireland who made their homes near a prison-
… continue reading...And if you would swop its functions
For a culture of bungalows
And light verse,
You know this is one
Of the places you belong in,
And that its public uniform
Has claimed your service.
As Reviewed By: J. K. Halligan
Invisible Ink by George Starbuck. Edited by Kathryn Starbuck and Elizabeth Meese. The University of Alabama Press, 2002. 82 pp.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings by John Berryman. Edited by John Haffenden. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999. 416 pages.
In the introduction to Berryman’s Shakespeare, John Haffenden, the book’s editor and an early biographer of Berryman, admits: “No one who reads this volume will be looking for permanent scholarship: they will be looking for the poet’s reflections on another artist, and for the poet’s critical insights….”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: William Gibson
Last Poems by James Schuyler. Slow Dancer Poetry, 1999. £7.99
James Schuyler, the Chicago born winner of the 1981 Pulitzer prize, is dead–and has been since 1991.… continue reading...
Black Series by Laurie Sheck. Knopf, 2001.
In the Life of Cowley, Dr. Johnson famously disparages the metaphysical poets, remarking, “Wit, abstracted from its efforts upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors.… continue reading...
The Chime by Cort Day
Alice James Books ($11.95)
A Summer Evening by Geoffrey Nutter
Colorado/Center For Literary Publishing ($14.95)
At some point, poets stopped writing about what they knew and began writing about what they didn’t know (I can’t think of a single good reason to try and pinpoint an exact time period for this; it was a rather gradual change, and the ensuing debate if I got it wrong would be neither productive nor trustworthy).… continue reading...
The Moon and Other Failures by F. D. Reeve. Michigan State University Press, 1999. $17.95 (paper). 65 pages.
The Urban Stampede and Other Poems by F.… continue reading...
On the Relation of His Criticism to His Poetry
As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis
There are two Eliots, the poet and the critic, which bear a curious relation to one another.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
The Roots of Treason by E. Fuller Torrey. McGraw-Hill, 1984. 339 pp.
The Genealogy of Demons by Robert Casillo. Northwestern University Press, 1988. 463 pp.… continue reading...
Futurism, the great European art movement of the early 20th century, found an audience of one in the industrialized new world, and that was Hart Crane.… continue reading...
Click here to read The Sacred Wood by T. S. Eliot free of charge.
As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis
“I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written.”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Peter Campion
Christopher Logue is a knave of the old stripe.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
The Thousand Wells by Adam Kirsch. Ivan R. Dee, 2002. $18.95.
… continue reading...“It is very likely that the really vital poetry of the next generation will be not about God at all–the poets who currently treat that theme often descend into banality or obscurity–but about other profound and secular themes: love, marriage, loneliness, aging, death.”
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...
By: Dana Gioia
[Editor’s Note: The Tenth Anniversary Edition of Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture will be published in August 2002 by Graywolf Press.… continue reading...
The artistic movement which Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909 with his famous manifesto, which Guillaume Apollinaire would soon call le nouveau esprit, and which quickly spread throughout continental Europe as the last great art fashion, Il Futurismo, never took root in England or America.… 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...
As Reviewed By: Brian Henry
The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets by David Lehman. Doubleday, $27.50 (hardcover). Anchor Books, $16.95 (paper).… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Brian Henry
Pilots and Navigators by Antony Dunn. Oxford University Press. 55pp. £6.99.
A first book of poetry titled Pilots and Navigators could indicate an adventurous sensibility, a youthful restlessness underpinning the poems.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: William Gibso
The Sound of Light by John Heath-Stubbs. Carcanet, 1999. 72 pp. £7.99.
I once spent a drunken evening in London with twice short-listed for British Poet Laureate John Heath-Stubbs, OBE.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Madonna anno domini by Joshua Clover. Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
It is often important to understand why an audience acquires certain books, especially when this unmasks a shallowness on our part, or a susceptibility to the slick iconography of marketing departments.… continue reading...
We live in an age awash with bad books. This fact, though that statistical non-entity the average reader may be unaware of it, constitutes the greatest crisis facing literature at the end of this century.… continue reading...
