"On a superficial level Mr. Hoagland’s poems — he writes in an alert, caffeinated, lightly accented free verse — resemble those of many writers in what one is tempted to call the Amiable School of American Poets, a group for which Billy Collins serves as both prom king and starting point guard." Dwight Garner on Tony Hoagland • New York Times

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"Humility, absent from The Divine Image, is clearly not the usual Christian virtue for Blake. It appears as a diseased growth which, in modern psychoanalytical terms, might equal 'repression' or 'denial'." Carol Rumens on William Blake • The Guardian

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"A real poem, that is, lives with the possibility that it might not be any good, and no amount of training, or canny targeting, can ever lessen that." Peter McDonald • Verse Palace

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"One idea of poetic ambition sees not the poem, but the book of poems, as a single extended imaginative act, demanding of the reader the same sustained attention that, say, a novel requires, and providing commensurate rewards. It is precisely this sustained attention that the new technologies—those by which we are encouraged to learn and feel and communicate—so routinely defeat." Karl Kirchwey on Louise Glück • Philadelphia Inquirer

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"Too few poets write criticism. Too few venture beyond their tribal affiliations." Carol Rumens and James Sutherland-Smith discuss the state of British poetry • The Bow Wow Shop

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"Rather, give me the comic. Frission of the unexpected against expectation, the lyric twisted into a blague." Ravi Shankar • The Quarterly Conversation

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"Jeremy Reed has been trying to get me along to see his warehouse of books for weeks. I’ve finally succumbed to another book-fix, the foxed underworld of signed poetry first editions." Chris McCabe • Hand + Star

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"By that token, a poet would be an endangered species, condemned to live without a spine. Maybe that’s why he so often has recourse to alibis. When questioned, he refers to his other occupations." Durs Grunbein • Poetry

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"As new poetries assert that there can be both 'homage and reappropriation,' new methods of translation arise and language is stretched, tested, discovered, and discovered anew." Ellen Welcker • The Quarterly Conversation

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"This opening scene is a 'zerologue'—presumably, a speech act without voice—and it’s only in the next scene, by a 'formica lake,' that a voice seems to enter at all." Ailbhe Darcy on Andrew Zawacki • Reconfigurations

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"Ignoring the stuff about ‘Major Poetry’ (is Major Poetry in the same army as Captain America?) you are still left with the word ‘problematic’." Tim Atkins on Martin Corless-Smith • Onedit

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"There is no shortage of ice cream cones in either of these poets." D.H. Tracy on Frederick Siedel and Robert Hass • Poetry

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"Aside from Lowell, who dominated postwar poetry in America in much the same way that Hughes dominated it in Britain, America’s few pluses, for Hughes, include his discovery of Emily Dickinson, “America’s greatest poet, without a doubt.”" Bruce Bawer on the letters of Bishop, Lowell, Hughes and Ginsberg • The Hudson Review (scroll down for pdf link)

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"The apparently confining poetic structure of this stubbornly persisting form may prove one of the most accommodating poetic shapes." Annie Finch on the sonnet • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"Burns' central insight is that the spiritual, the social, the sexual, the natural, the political and the humorous are overlapping human realms, not separate or competing ones. To pretend otherwise is a lie." Don Paterson • The Guardian

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"We listened to old-fashioned nature poetry that evening, while sipping an algae-green concoction called an Olympic Cocktail, whose recipe had been given to us by the Irish sex shop clerk next door." John Cotter on August Kleinzahler • Open Letters Monthly

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"Later, there was a group reading in Manchester, even as an unbuttoned United having won the European Cup were paraded through the city on an open-topped municipal bus." Michael Hofmann on Ian Hamilton • Poetry

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"Human beings . . . have a near mastery of mechanical and artistic products, but they continue to fail at their internal inventions: loves, desires, ambitions." Michael Baltasi on Ciaran Carson • Chicago Review (pdf)

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"I have never cared for any of the big Isms because they tell you little about aesthetic value . . . [W]e read books because of their complexity, intensity, their ability to be reread." Marjorie Perloff in conversation with Alcir Pécora • Sibila

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"[L]ike a pinecone next to a Kmart manager." Tao Lin • Poetry

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"A word like 'innovative' is owned by the university. There is no avant-garde." Alice Notley • Signals

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"“No ideas but in things”. This might be the most mis-taken piece of good advice in contemporary creative writing, and used to hammer every abstract word out of every poem brought to workshop. But Williams’ poetry is very alive to ideas (just as Basho is very alive to the individual’s emotions)." Philip Gross on Basho and William Carlos Williams • Magma

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"Like other Greek intellectuals considered 'troublemakers' by General Metaxas, Engonopoulos was drafted and sent to the front. Following a particularly gruesome battle on 13 April 1941, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and held in a work camp until his escape, when he wandered 'over half of Greece on foot.'” George Kalamaras on Nikos Engonopoulos • Rain Taxi

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"The way he would lean across a podium to his audience, remove his glasses, dangle them in his hand—thrown slightly whomperjawed from his double-jointed elbow." Mary Flinn on Larry Levis • Blackbird

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"He is a classic instance—with his London publisher—of the writer’s virtue that Auden compared to a valley cheese: produced locally but prized elsewhere." Bernard O'Donoghue on Thomas McCarthy • The Irish Times

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"[T]he net Donne describes knits the eternal soul to the temporal body, the metaphysical to the physical, . . . macrocosmos to microcosmos." Lianne Habinek on John Donne • Open Letters

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"A liking for crossword puzzles helps." PK Page • Northwest Review

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"For all the so-called connectedness of a blog, nothing unites—author and reader, reader and world—more than a poem." Allison Glock • Poetry

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"What does risk encompass in a poem?" Five responses: Raymond John de Borja, Peg Boyers, Adam David, Angelo Suarez, and Naya Valdellon • High Chair

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"For me, poetry has no point in existing if it’s not to be a prompt or aid to political and ethical change." John Kinsella • Poetry

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"This method of taking material from existing sources and then rewriting or simply changing the 'meaning' by the shifting context caused by juxtaposition has been around for a very long time now but Lopez proves there is still plenty of life, as well as variety, in this form of processing." Steve Spence on Tony Lopez • Stride

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"[W]riting gives me more active engagement with the world than almost anything else at all." Q&A with Robert Creeley • Smartish Pace

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"[A]ngry denunciations of the stupid audiences, ignorant critics, dumb fads, inept rivals, and general decay of poetry and taste in his time." Robert Pinsky on Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick • Slate

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"The Oulipo are, like, so hot right now." Simon Turner on Matthew Welton • Hand + Star

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"The world always remembers poetry. Sooner or later." John Steen on Jean Daive's Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan • The Oxonian Review

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"it is our inability to grasp a moment as it occurs completely, before it becomes the something else of memory." Alyssa Pelish on Donna Stonecipher's The Cosmopolitan • Powell's / Rain Taxi Also: Rachel Harkai • NewPages And: Shevi Berlinger • Contrary

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"Once you’ve heard one sassy woman talking back you’ve kind-of heard them all." Miriam Gamble • Verse Palace

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"The 'unique perspective' of this poetry 'allowed him to see history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye.'” Keith Taylor on C.P. Cavafy • Boston Review Another view: John Herbert Cunningham • The Quarterly Conversation

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"Hopkins’s poems aren’t symphonies, they’re the loud, strange, almost hypnotic sounds the orchestra makes warming up in the pit." Steve Donoghue on Paul Mariani's Gerard Manley Hopkins

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"Isn’t a poem at least as alive as an enterprise, or a factory?" Michael Hofmann • Poetry

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"I was eager for the chance to select Canadian poems so as to show our current poetry in a very attractive light to anyone who enjoys reading."AF Moritz • The National Post

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"In sheer terms of semantic madness my favorite reality show title is Paris Hilton’s My New BFF." Kazim Ali • American Poetry Review

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"Magrelli's effort to understand is clearly the product of a passion fired by wit, a passion honoured in the knowledge of its cost." Sean O'Brien on Valerio Magrelli • The Guardian

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"A Prynne poem contextualises the subjective in a fragmented form and strands him at the periphery of the communicative framework." Matthew Hall on J.H. Prynne • Cordite

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"[Larkin] assertively expressed his incomprehension and reveled in his disgust over the style changes [John] Coltrane initiated." John G. Rodwan on Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin • Open Letters

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"This joyride isn't over and . . . we're all in this together." Nine poets and critics on the past decade in poetry: 2000-2009 • Poetry

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"He was a poetry scholar who drank heavily and had a wide circle of friends. Not long after Da Huang was born, Meng Yuan walked into a Party propaganda session and announced, ‘These neophytes shouldn’t be leading specialists…’" Bei Dao • Granta

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"John Ashbery may or may not be, as Rosenberg writes, 'the most eminent English-language poet alive,' but such eminence looks rather meager when compared to the distinction Jeremiah claims for himself." Adam Kirsch on the literary bible • New Republic

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"He may be doing something magnificent; he may be trying to cease the withering." Ken L. Walker on the art of William Blake

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"Then the clocks go haywire. Sometimes a day is like nothing at all and then right on its heels comes a night that is like . . . a thousand days." Rainer Maria Rilke • Paris Review

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"The cream in the instant coffee is always 'slightly sour' (100), the ice in the whiskey melting (159), the lunch hour nearly over." Marjorie Perloff on Frank O'Hara • Lana Turner

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"See what has become of me? I’ve never stopped desiring your attention." W.S. Di Piero • Threepenny Review

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"Translation is a treasuring and guardianship of border/lines: a guardianship, in drawing and redrawing our attention to what is on either side of the border, and a treasuring, in ensuring that the lines stay open, permeable, porous." The Volta Project • The International Literary Quarterly

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"The specific details – the half-empty trams, the cream tie, seem to struggle to press some vivid reality on a scene the poet seems to have half vanished from. " Peter Sirr on Luciano Erba • Poetry Ireland Review

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"The libretto is a dying art." Michael Symmons Roberts • Wall Street Journal

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"Ponsot’s own writing, like Ponsot’s version of Hopkins, can seem so self-consciously affirmative, so determined to look on the bright side, as to miss a great deal of what other people see." Stephen Burt • New York Times Review of Books

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"I realized that what she had done was suddenly complete." W.S. Merwin on Deborah Digges • Brick

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"[T]he essays demonstrate one hard way to live in language: through resistance, fidelity to attention, ethical suspicion of the drifts of mind flesh is heir to, and a tough-minded honouring of the example of the dead." Adam Piette on Geoffrey Hill's Collected Critical Writings • Blackbox Manifold

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"We may have started making stylish poems as shallow, and reductive, as the sentimentality they presumably guard against" Ellen Bryant Voigt • Michigan Quarterly Review

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"[T]his collectively drawn map of the ever-shifting territory[.]" Attention Span 2009 • Third Factory Also: No Tell 2009 best books

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"Reference, brevity, self-restraint, attention outside the self, material objects as models, Williams and his heirs as predecessors, classical lyric and epigram as precedents: all these, together, constitute the New Thing." Stephen Burt • Boston Review

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"Rooted as they are in the quotidian – in real things (often with settings in a historical past) – they always nonetheless seem deep and strange." Eamon Grennan on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin • The Irish Times

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'The bane of language, for Ashbery as for Flaubert, is the “received idea.”' "Helen Vendler • New York Times Review of Books

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"Pick up a newspaper and a sharpie, read carefully and start making your mark." Travis Macdonald • Jacket

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“'Invent a dream in which you appear as a poet.' This might be the cleanest description of Spicer’s practice of poetry: inhabiting a dream, coming to believe it." Jared White on Jack Spicer • Open Letters

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"Poetry in Serbia has managed to stay healthy despite the Serbian Association of Writers." James Sutherland-Smith • Poetry London

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"Who are these mourners processing to the grave...?" James Fenton, Alan Jenkins and others remember Mick Imlah • TLS / Oxford Poetry

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"[Stephen Rodefer's] act of creation is . . . constituted by the deliberate garbling of the standard signals of traditional form." Lindsay Kathleen Turner • Verse Online

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"He once spoke of how being 'modern' meant displaying 'new neuroses and old furniture'." Paul Reitter on the selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal • Times Literary Supplement

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"'An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.'" Patrick Kurp on Geoffrey Hill's Selected Poems •The Quarterly Conversation

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"She uses abstraction to zero in on a subject rather than to dodge it. When the poems work, the place or mood Wright has set out to capture appears in silhouette." John Cotter on C.D. Wright • Open Letters

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"[I]ts editors have done more than resuscitate Romanticism. They've also made it part of a vital tradition, generative of much of the imaginative work that sustains us today." Joe Safdie on Poems for the Millennium Vol. 3 • Jacket "These are our poems as much as are the poems written yesterday." John Bloomberg-Rissman • Galatea Resurrects

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"What do poets feel about this unsteady dance with commercialism?" Leo Hickman on the use of poetry in advertisements • The Guardian

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"The central lyric dummy who speaks for all of us — that’s the lyric mode — doesn’t only speak for the sexed-up moments but for the ponderous click of a casket lid. " Mary Jo Bang on Byron • Verse Palace / Poetry Daily

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"[L]iterature is commerce between adults who think well enough of themselves and others." Jordan Davis on poetry in translation • Boston Review

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"Poetry is a bit like architecture or engineering. It’s really about holding things together or keeping them up." An interview with Paul Muldoon • Literateur Part two here

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"It is a poetic economy of a kind that forbids, and leaves no room for, emotional overflow. Instead, Oppen's feeling for human endurance stays inside the words and understatement." Richard Swigg • Jacket

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"It’s a bit young, noisy and yup for my taste." August Kleinzahler • LRB

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"[J]ust as Eliot cobbled together a poem using quotations from Shakespeare’s plays, Hindu prayers, and Arthurian legend, we would use The Waste Land to make a comic book." Ben Powis • Gulf Coast

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"As if learning new languages, by immersion." Peter Campion on Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin and Roddy Lumsden • Poetry

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'"As we have already explained conclusively, the Writings of Ern Malley are utterly devoid of literary merit as poetry.'" Christine Wertheim • Cabinet

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"A would-be poet with a thin education could do worse than enter into an affair with an intellectual fifteen years his elder." Ange Mlinko on Rilke • The Nation

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"Ashbery still has his ear to the ground, he's still listening, and the results are fun, funny, often wise, sometimes brilliant." Craig Morgan Teicher on John Ashbery's Planisphere • Bookforum "[S]ome seriously, mock-and-at-the-same-time-truly spectacular, and fun, poetic vividness," says Steven Fama.

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"Proust’s prose, much like Ashbery’s poetry and creative prose, involves extended sentences that arrive flush with the passing of time; they do their best to hold off the 'certitude' or 'stopping point' of a period." John Deming • Coldfront

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"Like Shakespeare, Yeats is inescapable." Robert Huddleston • Boston Review

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"We move through our world by telling ourselves that we know where we are, when in fact the world is immune to our cartographies." Jessica Burstein on Mina Loy's "Lunar Baedeker" • Poetry

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"'I have nothing but stony places to look forward to. This isolates me, of course, from those who can pass in and out of stony places with practised ease.'" Michael Wood on The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. II: 1923-25 • London Review of Books Another view: Simon Heffer • The Telegraph

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"[A] ruthlessly intelligent writer who refuses to eschew musicality or necessary difficulty for the sake of fashion or populism." Three views on Don Paterson's Rain: John McCullough • Horizon Review, Adam Newey • The Guardian and I.E. Sawmill • Literateur

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"I’m interested in the life in shards, among shards, between shards, shard-to-shard." Kay Ryan • Poetry

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"Paul Muldoon and the photographer Norman McBeath’s Plan B could be seen as a form of Facebook Scrabble where McBeath kindly sets out the letters for Muldoon to mount up a series of triple letter and triple word scores" George Szirtes • Poetry London

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"The battle between 'purity' and 'plurality' begins." Stephen Ross • The Oxonian Review

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"I think of myself as actually very traditional, but that doesn't mean I don't experiment." Keith Waldrop in conversation with Craig Morgan Teicher • National Book Foundation Citation here.

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"To be able to live only in the two of you, and you in me--oh, that is an existence which would put us above all other humans." Friedrich von Schiller's 250th anniversary • The Observer Also: Christopher Metcalf • The Oxonian Review

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"A little of this goes a long way, but you can still see it from here." Sean O'Brien on Faber New Poets 1-4 • The Guardian Also: Gillian Grafton • The Wolf

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"You could never tell Wystan anything, just remind him of it." Alan Bennett • London Review of Books

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"[The] poets [in Voice Recognition] who seem genuinely interested in doing something with form, language and voice . . . catch the reader's attention with an often quite pronounced sense of provisionality and unpredictability." Two views: David Kennedy • Stride and Sarah Crown • The Guardian

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"A level of antagonism that to anyone unversed in the ways of poets would seem extraordinary" Blake Morrison • The Guardian

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"Of all directors, [Jane] Campion stood a decent chance of paying due respect to [Keats's] high-flying genius, while at the same time proving that he was someone who kept close to the ground." Andrew Motion on Bright Star • The Guardian "Keats is now going to write Ode to a Nightingale. Yes he is. It's behind you! Tweet, tweet!" Tanya Gold has a contrasting view • The Guardian And: Frances Wilson • Times Literary Supplement. A letter in defense of Keats: John Barnard • Times Literary Supplement. Also: Keats's death mask.

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"Without [the small press], the unifying . . . drone of the large, for-profit-only publishing houses will crush variation in literature." Independent publishers in conversation with Barbara Jane Reyes • Poetry Part two here. Part three here.

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"The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal." Stefan Collini • Times Literary Supplement

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"Telemachus runs a moving company. His truck is labeled: Metaphors." A.E. Stallings • Poetry

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"I think true fidelity sometimes calls for smashing up." Linda Gregerson in conversation with Adam Day • Memorious

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"The first lesson Empson taught was to slow down drastically." Jonathan Raban • London Review of Books

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"One gives us the thought itself, the other the mind thinking." Hannah Brooks-Motl on British and American poetry • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"Homer was himself a poet who sang for his supper." Anne Carson • Arion

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"Look, a poem either sends you a bill or writes you a check." David Kirby on Amy Gerstler • The New York Times

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"Alas, the problem with immortality is that it is awarded posthumously." Josephine Hart • The Guardian

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"Michael Hofmann’s subtle shifts of diction feel like weaponry, selected from an extremely varied linguistic arsenal." Daisy Fried • Poetry

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"The utility of our iconic nostalgia is finally fading." Dorothy Barresi • Prairie Schooner

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"Franz Wright is uningratiating, bumptiously witty, inexhaustibly joyless and routinely surprising." Daisy Fried • The New York Times

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"But for us, at least, roses, here." Carol Rumens introduces Ursula Bethell • The Guardian

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"A carnivore if not a cannibal in the blandly vegan compound of contemporary poetry." Michael Hofmann on Frederick Seidel • Poetry

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"We read poems because they have a knack for mattering. And how pleasing it is to be so gently, so poetically reminded of that." David Orr on The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker • The New York Times

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"Any great poet's language is witheringly idiosyncratic." James Longenbach on Wallace Stevens • The Nation

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"Glück remains our great poet of annihilation and disgust, our demigoddess of depression." William Logan • The New York Times

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"Stevens has won a wide audience in spite of the guard he put on his privacy, and we are now better acquainted with his sorrows." Helen Vendler • The New York Times

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"What does real independence look like? Possibly something like the work of Thom Gunn." David Orr • The New York Times

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"Briggflatts is a great poem of love and loss, identity and vocation, restlessness and belonging." Paul Batchelor on Basil Bunting • The Guardian

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"Frederick Seidel's champions consistently and disingenuously transform his aesthetic weaknesses into virtues." Ange Mlinko • The Nation

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"His rediscovery, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a major event, because he is one of the finest poets alive." Clive Wilmer on Samuel Menashe • The Guardian

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"A kind of imaginative grace." Robert Anthony Siegel on Basho • LA Times

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"Few poets can have put themselves forward quite so much as Umberto Saba." Peter Hainsworth • TLS

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"Marianne Moore likes to keep everything shifting and vibrating. That the reader is never completely sure suits her purpose." Robert Pinsky • Slate

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"What most distinguishes Tranströmer's poetry is an almost preternatural knack for metaphor." Bill Coyle • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"At that moment the someone else who was in the shower came out of the shower and we were both of us distracted for the rest of the day and even into the next." Martin Stannard interviews himself • Stride Magazine

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"He’s like a violinist who pauses from bowing expertly through Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 to smash his instrument against the wall." David Orr on Frederick Seidel • The New York Times

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"In French, one doesn’t just clear one’s throat, one has a cat in the throat... So what if I were to decide to talk with a cat in the throat?" Caroline Bergvall on bilingualism • Jacket

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"To begin with, I reasoned, buses are cheaper than trains, and it is a well-known fact that when Herbert first went abroad, he traveled on a shoestring." Ewa Hrniewicz-Yarbrough on Zbigniew Herbert • Threepenny Review

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"Despite all the barriers, this poetry does communicate, even urgently, to modern Western readers." Adam Kirsch on classical Chinese poetry • The New Republic

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"They also serve who only sit and type." David Gates on Janet Frame • The New York Times

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"Why should we contribute to the disrepute of language as the next best thing to dismissing it altogether?" John Banville on Beckett's letters • The New Republic

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"The idea of ‘nothing at all’ fascinated her all her life." Colm Toíbín on the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell • London Review of Books

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