The Page - Poetry, essays, ideas

“Lawrence Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes him one of the scariest writers I know.” David Kirby • The New York Times

“What has happened to make John Clare such a magnetic, pervasive presence?” Richard Mabey • The Times

“Where is the creative response to climate change?” Robert Macfarlane • The Guardian

“The deeper story is how much Plath and Hughes helped each other with their work and their careers.” Michael Frank • The New York Times

“The novel has the rare capacity to nudge us out of our ideological trenches.” Giles Fraser • The Guardian

“In our time, the point that needs making is that a good poem is just as good as a popular movie.” Charles Bernstein • The Argotist

“Over the years, Anne Carson has learned how to transform anger into an empowering force.” Mark Rudman • BookForum

“Every loss of a human being, the Homeric simile suggests, is the loss of part of the world.” Dana Levin • American Poetry Review

“Piotr Sommer enjoys mocking the notion that poetry can ever be reduced merely to a set of political imperatives.” Mark Ford • The Guardian

“The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a somber graveyard of dead books.” Carlos Fuentes • Sign and Sight

“The best way to deal with it is to fry eggs for refugees.” Andrei Codrescu • The New York Times Magazine

“The distinctive voice is at the heart of all worthwhile art.” Murray Bail on reading translations • The Guardian

“We are our own fate, connected to everything we make happen and that happens to us.” Julian Evans on Imre Kertész • The Daily Telegraph

“Sometimes the world is more ready to listen to a poet than to his work.” Joy Goswami • Poetry International

“The fundamental confusion, which is everywhere apparent, between poetry and prose in America has become the abyss from which very few young poets escape.” Garrick Davis • Contemporary Poetry Review

“The great blight of narrative poetry is information.” Christian Wiman on Glyn Maxwell • The New York Times

“I’m not dealing with facts, I’m dealing with emotion.” Carol Ann Duffy talks to Jeanette Winterson • The Times

ALSO: Colm Toibin on Edmund Wilson • Rachel Donadio on writers’ e-mail

“The whole idea of taking time — over art, but not only over art — is itself an idea that we don’t take enough time over.” Adam Phillips • The New York Times

“What makes Milosz great is his acknowledgment of what can never be regained, and his passion for life nevertheless.” David Keplinger • Agni

“Being mathematically certain that I was no more foolish than Lucio, I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel.” Lampedusa, by Javier Marías • Threepenny Review

“Translation is much more than an offering of new trinkets in the literary bazaar.” Eliot Weinberger • Fascicle

“Not all we have lost was necessarily great.” Sebastian Faulks • The Times

“Poets often have used letters to arrive at new ways of thinking about poems.” David Orr • The New York Times

“At 92, he is the last pre-war Yiddish writer still working in Eastern Europe.” Stefan Wagstyl on Josef Burg • Financial Times

ALSO: Camille Paglia on The First Poets • Linton Kwesi Johnson on Mutabaruka • Jabari Asim on Paul Laurence Dunbar

“Frenzied updating is not the solution; poetry can take care of itself.” Helen Vendler on Dante in English • London Review of Books

“Most Canadian poets aren’t willing to work at their craft — they’d rather be poets than write poetry.” John Lofranco and Ian LeTourneau talk form • Bookninja

“Picking authors before they’re ripe represents a bad deal for all concerned.” Tim Clare • The Guardian

“I sometimes find the whole protocol of writing a poem strange and presumptuous.” Glyn Maxwell talks to Robert Potts • The Daily Telegraph

“The strange and wonderful are too much with us.” The letters of Amy Clampitt, by Elizabeth Lund • Christian Science Monitor

“In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.” Peter Schjeldahl • The New Yorker

“A wide and diverse range of superb poets exists in Britain. Why can’t a single, inclusive anthology introduce American readers to them?” Kevin Clark (pdf) • Georgia Review

“There is something terrible, almost unspeakably terrible, in our lives, and it demands respect.” The letters of James Wright, reviewed by Andrew Frisardi • Los Angeles Times

“Iain Hamilton Finlay returns again and again to the sustaining power of words.” Sarah Crompton • The Daily Telegraph

“The duck’s legs, though short, cannot be lengthened without causing dismay to the duck.” Making nothing happen, by John Brehm • Good Times

“In these airy, white spaces, it is as if a voice — wry, but authoritative — is addressing you from far, far away.” Iain Hamilton Finlay, by Rachel Cooke • The Observer

“By winnowing the formal and rhetorical possibilities down so far, Merwin was asking his poems to be vehicles for wisdom or nothing at all.” Dan Chiasson • The New York Times

“Saskia Hamilton’s edition of Lowell’s letters will go a long way towards steadying the balance of his reputation.” Andrew Motion • The Guardian

“From beginning to end, a poem is a sound, a voice, a continuous music that approximates its subject.” David Biespiel • The Oregonian

“Very few poets understand language’s singing side, its vocal music, half as well as Angie Estes.” Stephen Burt • The Believer

“It is not enough for the poem to look like a poem. It has to achieve something.” Lars Gustafsson • Poetry International

“Editors matter, because what’s wrong with a book can be something the author has repressed all knowledge of.” Blake Morrison • The Guardian

“The novel, so often declared dead or moribund, is as vital now in this time of profound political crisis as it has ever been.” Jason Cowley • The Observer

“Sophocles, Shakespeare and Flaubert knew the human race at least as well as any psychologist.” Denis Dutton • The Washington Post

“The sensitive lyric poet ‘humbly’ invokes his or her desire for spiritual revelation, while under his or her work lies either ego-display or the seduction of the fashionable.” Ira Sadoff • American Poetry Review

“In his use of landscape, Anthony Hecht matches Thomas Hardy.” David Yezzi • The New Criterion

“Bellow's prose, with its colloquial interruptions and its habit of mixing high and low registers, rarely sounds exactly English. But it often sounds biblically English.” James Wood • TLS

“I don’t like to call myself a poet. Most poets are shiftless, no-account fools.” August Kleinzahler talks to Timothy Williams • The New York Times

“Theodore Roethke and James Wright both paid a high aesthetic price for their belief that earnestness could make a poem live.” Adam Kirsch • The New Yorker

“How do you separate the passionate response to Akhmatova’s verse from the quality of that poetry?” Neal Ascherson • The Observer

“When is a borrowing a theft, and when is it a benign sign of cross-cultural fertilization?” Margaret Drabble • TLS

ALSO: Stephen Burt on Camille Paglia • Hugh Roberts on Bill Manhire

“The realist writer must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped.” James Wood • The New Republic

“The unqualified ardor with which W.G. Sebald’s prose was received says nearly as much about the needs of his admirers as it does about his own achievements.” Michael André Bernstein • The New Republic

“Since buying our last album, they’ve gone out and bought books by every author we’ve worked with.” Indie-rock literati • Boston Phoenix

“Robert Lowell’s letters are full of odd vagaries of tone, unconvincingnesses, the unceasing, ultimately heroic effort to catch up with himself.” Michael Hofmann • The Observer

“I know I am in the grip of a true poem when I can hardly bear to read it calmly at first.” Dennis O'Driscoll talks to Mark Thwaite • Ready Steady Book

“No one... has done more than he has to regenerate engagement with Scottish literature.” David Daiches 1912-2005 • The Independent

“If this was anything other than poetry, the Department of Justice would be all over it.” The Foetry affair • Detroit News/ Los Angeles Times

“For the time being our life depends on machinery — chainsaws, generators, grass-cutters and so forth. Now, when I first came up here I didn’t have any of that, and there may come a time again when I don’t have it. And so there are other strategies, too.” James Campbell profiles Gary Snyder • The Guardian

“Here’s the thing: my father uses my poems to sell timeshare.” Vive Griffith • Gettysburg Review

“He’s a dictator without a domain, an immensely talented author whose reputation suffers... from what happens before the words go on the page.” Bill Gibron on Harlan Ellison • Pop Matters

“Friends email from other countries, the bombs have made news in America. It is the sort of news they understand.” Iain Sinclair • The Guardian

“My own approach to book publishing has been influenced significantly by indie music labels.” Johnny Temple • Book Standard

“Given the millions of unique contexts in which we find individual letters, these letters have taken on meanings separate from the words they inhabit.” Geof Huth, Ron Silliman and Crag Hill on visual poetry • Exchange Values

“Captain Hook is wonderful not because he is Mr Darling’s alter ego but because he blusters in velvet and periwig, and is pursued by a ticking crocodile.” A. S. Byatt on J. M. Barrie • New Statesman

“What is utopic thinking, after all, but desire writ very, very large?” Joyelle McSweeney on Joshua Corey • Constant Critic

“In spite of their inherent slowness, organizing information is a job that’s still best done by people, and in most places those people are called librarians.” Dennis Loy Johnson on the Google Library Project • MobyLives

“Nothing, indeed, looks quite so sad, in both the traditional and the modern sense of the term, as yesterday’s travel guides dragged out into the sunlight by today’s travellers.” Jonathan Keates on Victorian tourists • TLS

“Wiener’s nightmare vision of a few giant computers determining the fate of human societies never came to pass. But other aspects of Wiener’s vision of the future are coming true.” Freeman Dyson on Norbert Wiener • New York Review of Books

“A Granta magazine parody of the young critic, which depicted him as lying in a welter of banana skins while sucking ink from the carpet, understated the spectacular squalor in which Empson lived.” Miranda Seymour on William Empson • Los Angeles Times

“I like poetry because it helps me think. It helps me resort data. It lets me list things and then think about the shape of the list. I am not sure I can make poetry do much more than this.” Juliana Spahr talks to Michael Boyko • Tarpaulin Sky

“Philosophy, like light, is not static. It moves among the days, glinting off different rooftops and sections of the fields, breaking through and dimmed by clouds.” Karen Solie on Jan Zwicky • The Globe and Mail

“There is a constant sense in John Burnside’s best writing that, at any moment, a door might open on to a new range of possibilities.” Charles Bainbridge • The Guardian

“My ideal reader is an aficionado with a built-in, solid-state crap detector.” August Kleinzahler • Griffin Trust

“Poets who are psychologically chained to one style or approach might well find things in Jacket that offend them; open up, is what I say.” John Tranter talks to David Prater • Cordite

“The latest attempt at context and explication has the effect of helping to further demystify what is certainly the most overrated poem in the Anglo-American canon.” Christopher Hitchens on T.S. Eliot • The Atlantic / Powells

“Forty years on, it may be difficult to understand just how new, how different, and how singular Sylvia Plath’s voice was among contemporary poets of the time.” Carol Bere • Contemporary Poetry Review

“It is all a matter of wandering in a maze (those sentences) and suddenly recognising something familiar, the door of one’s own house, say, after a long walk in the dark.” Anita Brookner on Proust • The Spectator

“Jarrell on Auden is more than a virtuoso performing; he is a writer learning from his sense of the failures of another writer.” Jon Tribble • The Washington Post

“Elaine Feinstein has done English-speaking readers a great favour by making Anna Akhmatova’s life story, and therefore her poetry, more accessible to us than ever before.” Anne Applebaum • The Spectator

“It’s hard to escape the impression that for all his erudition, Adam Kirsch cares about poems only tangentially.” John Palattella • The Nation

“If writers were so good at living their lives, they wouldn’t spend so much time making up things that never happened.” Etgar Keret talks to Nancy Updike • The New York Times

“Adam Kirsch has not only succeeded in communicating the achievement of six remarkable American poets, but has also established himself as a poetry critic of the very first order.” Michiko Kakutani • The New York Times

“Weldon Kees was a major minor poet, yet that very stature, together with his ceaseless lusting to be other or better than he was, makes him a representative figure of his time.” Anthony Lane • The New Yorker

“Writing a modern biography of Orpheus or Homer is rather like writing a biography of Batman, or Madame Bovary, or God. There is plenty of material, but the exercise is misguided and futile.” Emily Wilson • The New Republic

“If poetry can’t change the world (or save our lives), it does mark a pause in which there’s no use for usefulness, and anything can take shape.” David Orr • The New York Times

ALSO: James Fenton on Dante in English • Walter Kirn on Lowell’s letters

“Graham Greene liked to compose elaborate practical jokes, and one suspects that he may have played a particularly cruel one by driving his biographer mad.” Matt Steinglass • The Nation

“Does the sudden eruption of Sartreana mark the beginnings of a permanent upward revaluation of the man and his work?” Kevin Jackson • Prospect

“It is probably safe to say that Gu Cheng was the most radical poet in all of China’s 2500 years of written poetry.” Eliot Weinberger • London Review of Books

“To invert a dichotomy such as ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture is not to transform it. It is to remain its prisoner.” Terry Eagleton • The New Statesman

“James Richardson became an academic and a poet by the usual means, but he is, by his own admission, an accidental aphorist.” Sarah Manguso • The Believer

“The cities of art and literature are cities twice imagined, for the communal creation must be recreated through the singular imagination.” Jed Perl • The New York Times

“I believe the poet shouldn’t be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.” Alice Oswald talks to Kate Kellaway • The Observer

“The trouble with poets’ letters, even the most readable ones, is that they are not poems.” Helen Vendler on Robert Lowell • The New Republic

“The older I get I think it’s not about voice, it’s about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention.” Kathleen Jamie talks to Kirsty Scott • The Guardian

ALSO: A.S. Byatt on David Constantine • Jan Morris on Ovid • Robert Potts on Richard Price • Joan Abse

“The death of Richard Eberhart, at the biblical age of 101, severed one of our last remaining links with the heroic age of modern poetry.” Adam Kirsch • The New York Sun

“Happiness and sanity? Let’s be glad we know them when we feel them, and concentrate instead on ways of reducing pain, anguish and rage.” Carol Tavris • TLS

Cordel poets, inheritors of Europe’s troubadour tradition, still roam the vast interior of Brazil’s northeast. Larry Rohter • The New York Times

“Where Shall I Wander affords us the rare opportunity to observe not only a poet writing at the peak of his powers — Ashbery has done that before — but a poet still discovering how to sound like himself.” James Longenbach • Boston Review

“The English-speaking reader is deprived of the vast majority of good books written in languages other than English.” Alberto Manguel • The Spectator

“It’s not entirely surprising that African literature in French should flourish outside Africa, since it was, in fact, born in exile — in Paris.” Lila Azam Zanganeh • The New York Times

ALSO: Charles Simic on Saul Steinberg • Jeremy Noel-Tod on John Masefield

“Robert Lowell tirelessly rewrote and reimagined everything, including his own life.” Charles McGrath • The New York Times

“McDonald’s is the same company everywhere. The mistake we sometimes make is when we think that McDonald’s means the same for a Pole as it does for an American.” A translators' roundtable, hosted by Damien Weaver • Bookslut

“In Fairfield Porter’s letters and in Myron Stout’s journals we find two highly self-conscious creators pushing and pulling at the power of words.” Jed Perl • The New Republic

“Specimen Days only recycles the most rote aspects of Whitman — ‘he celebrated everything’ — and doesn’t add to our reading of him.” Meghan O’Rourke on Michael Cunningham • Slate

“The literary essays of Kenneth Cox are among the finest essays written by anyone, on any subject, in English.” August Kleinzahler • Jacket

“A word as a work of art, rather than just something to be read, is both strange and familiar—at times even funny—and therein lies the allure.” The Economist on Ed Ruscha

“There’s still a large, self-contained literary element in each country — Britain and the United States — that tends to view the poetry of its transatlantic cousins with condescension if not with outright disdain.” John Drexel • Contemporary Poetry Review

“Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh all wrote poetry. On the whole, you do not want a poet at the helm.” Ben McIntyre on Dominique de Villepin • The Times

ALSO: James Wood on William Empson • David Morley on Iain Bamforth • Ciaran Carson on Brian Merriman • Yves Bonnefoy

“Robert Lowell makes a clear place for himself as one of the finest letter writers in modern literature.” Jonathan Raban • The New York Review of Books

“Novels tend to be a game for the middle-aged because what holds them together are the complicated relations between characters, situations and events.” Benjamin Markovits • The New Statesman

“When so many come away from American poetry today with a feeling of disappointment or outrage, is experience what they are really missing?” Christina Pugh • Poetry

“Cultural Translation spells the very extinction and erasure of translation as we have always known and practised it.” Harish Trivedi • 91st Meridian

“Brecht’s maddening greatness as a writer reveals that the alchemy of art — our only means, sometimes of telling the truth — comes filtered through untruth.” A.N. Wilson • The Daily Telegraph

“Thom was a wild man as well as a planner — a reckless risk-taker with a huge gusto for life.” Wendy Lesser: A symposium on Thom Gunn • The Threepenny Review ALSO: Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, Mike Kitay

“The Wounded Surgeon is a book with a flawed thesis, a few valuable readings of poems and a mess of missed opportunities.” David Lehman on Adam Kirsch • The New York Times

ALSO: David Herd on James Schuyler • Stephen Metcalf on Richard Wilbur • Owen Sheers on Keith Douglas

“The future may or may not turn out to be a place of justice and freedom; but it will certainly disprove the conservatives by turning out to be profoundly different from the present.” Terry Eagleton • The Nation

“There are probably no fewer worthwhile poems, novels and paintings now being made than there ever were. But there’s a vast increase in desperate, ego-driven shit.” Lee Siegel • The Nation

“Peter Watson’s sympathy for naturalism enables him to spot some crucial and neglected turns in the history of thought.” John Gray • The New Statesman

“Plato wanted the poets thrown out of the ideal Republic. For John Bayley, they are the way in, the entrance to the only habitable civil order, which can never be ideal.” Clive James • TLS

“Were Whitman alive today, he’d be a frequent commuter on the Long Island Expressway, the Garden State Parkway and the New Jersey Turnpike.” Charles McGrath • The New York Times

“People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don’t want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description.” Jonathan Safran Foer talks to Suzie Mackenzie • The Guardian

“When we talk about a mother tongue we are talking about more than language, we are talking about our sense of ourselves at the deepest layers of our being.” Gabriel Josipovici • TLS/Powells

“The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism is a pointer to the abysmal state of mind that prevails in so many of our universities.” Christopher Hitchens • The New York Times

ALSO: Michael Hofmann on Georg Heym • George Steiner on Schiller

“No problem in literature is less instantly soluble than the bewildering process by which one writer’s stock soars while another’s sinks into bankruptcy.” D.J. Taylor • The Guardian

“John Banville uses visual art to escape from the whole business of being an Irish writer.” Fintan O’Toole • Prospect

“I don’t want to think about anything, except to become language.” Stanley Kunitz turns 100, by Dinitia Smith • The New York Times

In a suddenly fragmented world, the distinction between novels and short stories is becoming blurred. Philip Hensher • The Daily Telegraph

“The voice of the poet rather than the voice of the poem: there is a difference, and in the relative emphasis we place on this difference we can locate aesthetic and political differences.” Michael Schmidt • PN Review / ReadySteadyBook

“Few modern poets are able to match Keats’s difficult requirement that a poem should not startle or amaze with itself, but with its subject.” A. N. Wilson • The Daily Telegraph

ALSO: Frank Kermode on William Empson • Nicholas Lezard on Goethe • Michele Leggott

“Literature and television may find, in the end, that they can make it through these rough times only by taking lessons in populism and seriousness from one another.” Andrew O’Hagan • The Daily Telegraph

“From the moment he began to think of himself as a poet, it seems, Larkin was convinced that the artist's calling would be incompatible with ordinary human happiness.” Adam Kirsch • TLS

“Jack Gilbert’s directness and lucidity ought to appeal to readers who can’t abide the inward-gazing obscurity of much contemporary poetry.” Meghan O’Rourke • Slate

“John Donne was the Cole Porter of his day, a writer of subtle popular songs rather than just the author of cerebral poetry, according to new research.” Dalya Alberge • The Times

“There is something at stake in America’s love affair with Letters to a Young Poet that cannot possibly be about poetry, or about Rilke.” Daniel Bosch • Contemporary Poetry Review

“Story plots are not unconscious archetypes, but follow, as Aristotle realized, from human interests and the logic of what is possible.” Denis Dutton • The Washington Post

“In A. R. Ammons’s poems there is an offbeat, sideways, unpredictable radiance.” Edward Hirsch • The New York Times

ALSO: Dana Goodyear • Durs Grünbein • Dennis O’Driscoll

“Perhaps Surrealism is the natural, instinctive pictorial mode, and both abstraction and realism are academic refinements.” John Updike • The New York Review of Books

“In the almost incredibly varied and bewildering realm of Sanskrit poetry, compassion and grief shine continually forth like gentle beacons.” Eric Ormsby • The New Criterion

“Deaf poets are often objects of amazement or dismissal, their work rarely judged for its merit.” John Lee Clark • Poetry

“Nathaniel Tarn offers a complicated, recombinant uneasy wisdom, the unbearable ‘maybe’ of the world.” Brenda Hillman • Jacket

“Opinions are rightly and generously the response an art may depend upon, but they do not determine what it is or can be.” Reflections on Whitman in age, by Robert Creeley • Virginia Quarterly Review

ALSO: Joel Brouwer on Kevin Young • Dial-a-Poem

“The Sugar Mile is a book of such effortlessly delicate storytelling that one hardly notices how ambitious a project it actually is.” Jon Mooallem on Glyn Maxwell • San Francisco Chronicle

“As Kafka found it impossible to finish his own novels, so you may find it impossible to be finished with Kafka.” Jonathan Lethem • The New York Times

For Adam Zagajewski, contemporary poetry is marked by “a disproportion between powerful expressions of the inner life and the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen.” Tess Lewis • The Hudson Review (pdf)

“Muriel Rukeyser’s interest and her importance go beyond our momentary agreement with her politics or her feelings.” David Kaufmann • The Forward

“Wittgenstein was wary of philosophy’s anaemic abstractions, which may be why writers and composers find his work so hospitable.” Terry Eagleton • TLS

“There are moments when the saeva indignatio which has become his theme turns into the boring rant of a silly old git.” A.N. Wilson on Geoffrey Hill • The Daily Telegraph

“Thom very much disliked, perhaps feared, the idea of slipping into decrepitude, and lived his last few years accordingly.” Thom Gunn: A poet’s life, Part II • San Francisco Chronicle

“He knew he was a good poet; he didn’t need scribbling critics or cramped academics to tell him so.” Thom Gunn: A poet’s life, Part I • San Francisco Chronicle

“If This Be Treason reminds us of the many Latin American writers whom we sometimes overlook because of the looming prominence of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.” Michael Dirda on Gregory Rabassa • The Washington Post

“The fogginess that has been a chronic problem in Jorie Graham’s work becomes especially inhibiting in Overlord.” David Orr • The New York Times

“Despite what everyone said, I always thought that there was something simple and penetrable in my poetry screaming to be let out.” John Ashbery talks to Nicholas Wroe • The Guardian

ALSO: Blake Morrison on Derek Walcott • James Fenton on Elizabethan lyrics

“Kevin Young’s preoccupation with looking back in reverence has become paralyzing instead of fructifying.” John Palattella • The Nation

“The eccentric use of the spatial page that accounted for E.E. Cummings’ notoriety must be seen in the end as the same reason for the apparent transience of his reputation.” Billy Collins • Slate

“To read Don Quixote is to be heartened that in the embrace of their illusions people are capable of decent, funny, unpredictable acts.” Julian Evans • Prospect

“The sense of entering an alien world and eerily feeling oneself at home is at the heart of literary culture.” Stephen Greenblatt • Los Angeles Times

“What he wrote about the fifties books constitutes a singularly Bellowesque mix of mind and memory.” Bellow on Bellow, introduced by Philip Roth • The New Yorker

“William Empson wanted to show us just how difficult it was for our language not to be difficult.” Adam Phillips • The Observer

ALSO: Michael Palmer • Amy Newman • Lucia Perillo

“E.E. Cummings is undeniably a one-trick pony. But it was his trick, and no one else’s, and when it came off, he could cause stunned delight.” Robert Potts • The Daily Telegraph

“We will do more justice to Kafka if we ask fewer questions about what he means, and instead look at the finely wrought and endlessly inventive fashioning of the fictional world that he invites us to enter.” Robert Alter • The New Republic

“Jorie Graham has always been a poet of something just outside our gaze, of the underneath, of the invisible, of something that works its way through matter like a ferocious hunger.” Calvin Bedient • Boston Review

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language.” Paul Celan, by Mark Glanville • Jewish Quarterly

“The lofty condition enjoyed by the poet takes up only perhaps two hours, or 1/84, of a week. I must spend 83/84 of the week as my cousin.” Kay Ryan • Poetry

“To read June Jordan today is to read her in a time when reflections of human solidarity, trust, compassion and respect are in danger of disappearing from our public landscape.” Adrienne Rich • Boston Review

“Adam Kirsch’s careful pursuit of a theory of a poetic generation has kept him from taking into account the pleasure principle of poetry.” Richard Howard • Los Angeles Times

“Kiddo,” he said wearily, “don’t they understand that we’re making it up as we go along?” Editing Saul Bellow, by Elizabeth Sifton • Slate

“Irving Feldman’s work can only be described in paradoxes: he is at once visionary and satirical, naive and jaded, prosy and lyrical.” Adam Kirsch • The New Republic

“It’s hard to be temperate about Michael Schmidt’s loving, informed and deeply engaging survey of ancient Greek poetry.” Michael Dirda • The Washington Post

“There is something of the gold standard about the echo and recall of poetry in the conscious mind.” Christopher Hitchens • Poetry

“To ask why Stevie Smith can’t be more serious is like asking why the wind can’t be squarer.” David Orr • The Believer

“He is the diamond cutter of line breaks.” William Corbett on Robert Creeley • Boston Phoenix

“What Saul Bellow wanted to reassert was the importance of individual life, intellect and social responsibility against mass movements and mass culture.” John Burnside • The Guardian

“If you think you’re a genius, seek therapy, not a publisher.” Mistakes poets make, collected by Roddy Lumsden • Magma

“Seamus Heaney is one of the few contemporary poets who insists that our initial response to a poem should be pleasure, delight, and surprise.” Carol Bere • Contemporary Poetry Review

“It is not only to gain something that we should seek solidarity, because solidarity, in itself, is a quality that gives meaning to life.” John Berger talks to Sean O’Hagan • The Observer

“There is no-one more cheerful than a man with a well-developed sense of his own mortality.” Ian Sansom on Charles Simic • The Guardian

“There is a huge gulf between the men who review contemporary poetry in the newspapers and cultural journals in Britain, and the majority of the people who actually read it.” Neil Astley • The StAnza lecture

“For all that he wrote in a minimalist style, his great subject was the most maximal of human emotions, love and the complications that arise from it.” Robert Creeley, 1926-2005, by Mark Feeney • Boston Globe • The New York Times • The Times

“She lived in the absolute, in the extreme, and that’s bound to be tragic.” Tzvetan Todorov on Marina Tsvetayeva • The New York Times

“If you feel a huge gap between what you’re told is going on and what you actually see and feel on your nerves — then this is the material of your art, there’s no escaping it.” Adrienne Rich talks to Heidi Benson • San Francisco Chronicle

“The talking cure may not work in theory, but it works in practice.” The fading of Freud, by Brenda Maddox • Prospect

“In the first instance Break, Blow, Burn is about poetry, and in the second it is about Camille Paglia.” Clive James • The New York Times

“What he would have felt about having his juvenilia resuscitated isn’t difficult to work out.” Larkin around, by Blake Morrison • The Guardian

“Guy Davenport was a model of intellectual independence, adopting nobody’s theories and toeing nobody’s line.” Bruce Bawer • BookForum

“His essays produce, in time-lapse glimpses, the equivalent of a memoir of how Ashbery turned himself into Ashbery.” Diane Middlebrook • Los Angeles Times

“Through his final book, A.R. Ammons proves an inventive, ever-evolving poet of the very nature of metamorphosis.” Megan Harlan • San Francisco Chronicle

“As I work, each experience will make the conclusions inconclusive again.” Happy birthday, Peter Brook, by Fiona Shaw • The Times

“Hecuba walks out of Euripides from 2,500 years ago straight on to our daily front pages and into our nightly newscasts. To our shame she is news that stays news.” Tony Harrison • The Guardian

“Czeslaw Milosz saw poetry as an art so important, so potentially powerful within the territory of human reason, that he dismissed poets who cared supremely and exclusively for beautiful combinations of words.” Adam Zagajewski • The New Republic

“Rhetoric, pinning notions to the wind with words, is fundamental to the Maori oral tradition, and Witi Ihimaera does not stint his birthright.” E. Jane Dickson • The Times

ALSO: Picasso’s prose poems • Apollinaire as war poet • Tim Kendall

“Who would have guessed that a boy of no great intellectual distinction from small-town Mississippi would become the most radical innovator in the annals of American fiction?” The making of William Faulkner, by J.M. Coetzee • The New York Review of Books

“Contemporary science not only gives us provocative things to imagine but also leaves us with more questions than answers.” Rae Armantrout • Jacket

“Gertrude Stein is the consummate avant-gardist. She is always ahead of the pack, even a rarefied pack.” Margo Jefferson • The New York Times

“The writers who speak to him most keenly share an awareness of the human species’ ‘burden of grief’.” Ruth Franklin on W.G. Sebald • Slate

“There is no shame in being a good professional in journalism, in political analysis, in literary criticism. But in poetry?” Mykola Ryabchuk • Poetry International

“Six years ago, when my husband, Paul Muldoon, a poet who teaches at Princeton, brought home an electric guitar, I was laughing too hard to absorb the enormity of what was happening.” Sleeping with the guitar player, by Jean Hanff Korelitz • The New York Times

“When Whitman told a friend that ‘the war saved me,’ he meant it.” Mark Rozzo • Los Angeles Times

“Hilary Spurling argues against the commonplace doctrine of the insensitive egotistical domestic tyrant sacrificing everyone’s happiness for the canvas.” Matisse the master, by Jeanette Winterson • The Times

“Lawrence was always associated with coming of age, so he gets caught up in embarrassments not of his making.” James Fenton • The Guardian

“God, she could be insulting to people. At the end — as I enjoy blubbering to friends — she was weally weally mean to me!” Terry Castle on Susan Sontag • London Review of Books

“The interpreters of his life make an honourable surrender before its mystery, and the plain question: what was the matter with this man?” The riddles of Kafka, by Michael Maar • TLS

“Ashbery’s poetry is still very much invested in the reader’s pleasure — more so than many supposedly ‘approachable’ poets.” Meghan O’Rourke • Slate

“Science has led me to think of poetry in terms of DNA, the concise language with a tiny alphabet that expresses us.” K. E. Duffin • Bookslut

“These pages are, to the Chilean revolution and counter-revolution, what A Tale of Two Cities once was to their French equivalents.” Christopher Hitchens on Isabel Allende • The Guardian

“Charles Bukowski accomplished something rare: he produced a large, completely distinctive, widely beloved body of work, something that few poets today even dream of.” Adam Kirsch • The New Yorker

“Poetry is doing just fine, and for anyone in need of evidence, the work of Durs Grünbein should suffice.” David Hellmann • San Francisco Chronicle

“We may not know much Ashbery by heart, but we recognize his voice the instant we hear it, because nobody else writes this way.” Charles McGrath • The New York Times

ALSO: Sean O’Brien on Geoffrey Hill • D.J. Taylor on Alan Jenkins • Michael Hofmann on Stefan Chwin

“What do dead narrators offer that live ones don’t?” The trouble with postmortality, by Elizabeth Tallent • The Threepenny Review

“Franz Wright manages to be arrogant on the page and get away with it with a touch of graceful brilliance.” Ilya Kaminsky • Web Del Sol Review of Books

“What we need is not the making of the career poet, but of unique and long-lived poems.” Ambition and greatness: An exchange • Poetry

“It is almost eerie to see a poet change so little.” Stephen Burt on Donald Justice • Boston Review

“For all that he was a mad egomaniac and an unabashed self-promoter, Voltaire remains matchlessly entertaining company, incapable of either shame or shoddy thinking.” Adam Gopnik • The New Yorker

“The spectacle of watching lesser poets make fleabites on their betters, while never exactly edifying, can at least be very entertaining.” Frank Kuppner, by William Wootten • The Guardian

ALSO: Stephen Burt on Richard Howard • James Wood on Conrad and Dostoevsky

“In 50 years, Chinese will probably still be the most widely spoken language, while English, at least as a native language, might have stagnated.” Helena Drysdale • The New Statesman

“We’re all old farts now. There might be some relief, at last, in this. You’ve just got to look at it in the right light.” Jenny Diski • London Review of Books

“Today we would like to chat with our readers about the objects which serve to complete a toilette, i.e. jewels.” Mallarmé’s latest fashion, by Patrick McGuinness • TLS

“Not since T.S. Eliot has any poet writing in English so consistently put words under this sort of pressure.” Alan Marshall on Geoffrey Hill • The Sunday Telegraph

“He has proved that a redneck Southern gentleman who has the fire in his belly and the indignation in his soul can make it happen.” Ralph Steadman on Hunter S. Thompson • The Independent

“In Primo Levi’s books and in his life, the number tattooed on his arm becomes not a dehumanizing statistic but the identifying mark of a great soul.” Robert Brustein • The New Republic

“Voltaire went to his grave believing Shakespeare had offered ‘a few pearls in an enormous dungheap’.” Sebastian Faulks • The Sunday Times

“In Anne Winters’s idiosyncratic vision, words — however gleaming — can act not as a glaze but as a stripper, eating through easy beliefs to the truth beneath.” Emily Nussbaum • The New York Times

“Of Bob Dylan’s many achievements, the most fundamental was his hitching together of the folk-lyric tradition and Western modernism.” Luc Sante • The New York Review of Books

“Those who know most about a topic are often the least well equipped to communicate it clearly.” Terry Eagleton • New Statesman

“You grab hold of German soil, and it turns to ashes in your hand. That is my eternal theme. That is what is required.” Elfriede Jelinek, by J.S. Marcus • Los Angeles Times

“To edit a poet from another country while remaining purposefully ignorant of that country constitutes not only shoddy scholarship but also a kind of literary colonization.” Bloom’s Kinsella, by Brian Henry • Jacket

“It is not the fault of poetry that reading the work of our finest poets takes patience.” Brenda Hillman on Donald Revell • The Nation

“Poetry is never comfortable in language because the unconscious doesn’t know how to speak.” Russell Edson: An interview with Mark Tursi • Double Room

“Arthur Miller never gave up his tempered idealism or his commitment to humane values and the prospect of a better, more just society.” Philip French • The Observer

“For up-and-coming young northern Irish poets, the stunning achievements of their elders probably appear both a blessing and a curse.” Nick Laird, by Mark Ford • The Guardian

“For all his verses, his childhood vapours, his vagabond adventures, Robert Louis Stevenson’s real job was to enlarge the psychological potential of the novel.” Andrew O’Hagan • London Review of Books

“All revolutions in English poetry have occurred via translations, when poets have unequivocally embraced what is distant and unfamiliar.” Sarah Maguire • Poetry Review

“How did a man who relied on horoscopes and seances write some of the best political poetry in the English language?” The edge of Ireland, by Justin Quinn • Contemporary Poetry Review

“Like a lot of poets, I fantasize about playwriting, the rehearsal-table, the stage-dust, and above all those endless rows of seats . . . ” Bill Knott talks to Adam Travis • Bookslut

“Like many people who sound sepulchral, he can be very funny.” Geoffrey Hill, by Nicholas Lezard • The Independent

“There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.” Becoming the emperor: Joan Acocella on Marguerite Yourcenar • The New Yorker

“Who among us does not think ‘I’m the one who can see the greater reality and everyone around me fails to see it’?” Edith Grossman on Don Quixote • Guernica

“The true morality of art is its accuracy.” Word power, by Craig Raine • The Guardian

“The Scots may claim, without contradiction, that they invented English 101.” The tartan takeover, by John Sutherland • Financial Times

“Perhaps all poets are attempting to find a home for those words or things they find indelible.” George Szirtes, by Paul Farley • The Guardian

“Brendan Kennelly’s extraordinary status as public property and private poet clearly has a great deal to do with the Irish view of poetry as an art form that straddles both spheres.” Christina Patterson • The Independent

“If translation was possible then it would not be necessary to keep on doing it.” William Oxley • Stride

“Shall I labor night and day / To build a reputation on one song? / . . . No, I thank you!” Cyrano, gaining in the translation, by Jonathan Yardley • The Washington Post

“There has been a severe and pessimistic attenuation of what art critics today believe their activity can achieve.” J.J. Charlesworth • Spiked

“By day, he buoyed the sinking sales of Jell-O; by night, he worked just as assiduously to build a second career as a man of letters.” Dana Gioia, by Philip Kennicott • Stanford Business

“One would be hard pushed to identify another living British director whose contribution to theatre has been so immense.” Peter Brook, by Dominic Cavendish • The Daily Telegraph

“He is like an Everyman for our time, tormented not only by sickness, emigration, poverty and loneliness, but also by ideas.” Witold Gombrowicz, by Adam Zagajewski • BookForum

“As a writer and as a thinker, as a husband and father, as a man and as a man of the world, he pays attention.” Carlos Fuentes, by Michael Dirda • The Washington Post

“We are really worms and specks. I find a certain comfort in that.” Laurie Anderson talks to Deborah Solomon • The New York Times

Auden once described him as “the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding.” Christopher Ricks, by Nicholas Wroe • The Guardian

ALSO: Dear Mrs Eliot, by Karen Christensen • James Fenton on Michael Hofmann’s translation of Durs Grünbein

“The trouble with translations is that they replace a burnished surface with a second-rate surrogate — and still manage to reveal a universe.” Swann’s ways, by Wyatt Mason • The New Republic

“What do French and American poets hear when they read or translate each other’s work? The murmur of confirmation or the thunderclap of revelation?” John Pallattella • The Nation

“A piece of the world, something glimpsed from a car window or from inside a bar, is the start of every poem. But the world inevitably sends you to language—to your language.” Richard Hugo’s constructivist moment, by Joshua Corey • Academy of American Poets

“Dislike of gossip! Where would any biographer be without gossip?” Lynn Barber on Hermione Lee • The Daily Telegraph

“There are competent poets, but nobody taking the world by storm the way Ginsberg did, or Lowell did. I worry about it.” Helen Vendler talks to Scott McLemee • The Chronicle of Higher Education

“It is the mark of a good poet, never mind a major one, that he is completely in control of language. Is this true of George Szirtes?” A.N. Wilson • The Daily Telegraph

“The Testament of Cresseid remains a telling achievement, a work out of the fifteenth-century mists that still bulks large in the 21st.” Seamus Heaney’s Henryson, by Phil Miller • The Herald

“Frank O’Hara figured out how to get you to read his poems more or less as you’d read poems by your close friends.” Stephen Burt • Academy of American Poets

“Edmund White shows that courtesy and compassion cut to the quick more effectively than journalistic bullying and nosiness.” Graham Robb • Los Angeles Times

“It takes miscalculation and perversity to procrastinate; but it takes courage to wait.” Loitering with intent, by Henry Shukman • The Guardian

“Stephen Spender is likely to be remembered for thinking continually of those who were truly great.” Michael Dirda • The Washington Post “I do not expect to embark on reading any more Pritchett, Spender, Isherwood or Greene as a result of reading their biographies.” Lisa Jardine • The Times

ALSO: Victor Hugo • Nick Laird • Carola Luther

“Jackson Mac Low was a Zen Jewish alchemist—converting words into quarks and sparks.” Charles Bernstein • BookForum

“The co-existence of so many apparent contradictions in one person have always added to the fascination of Stanley Moss and his poetry.” Mark Glanville • The Jewish Quarterly

“The poems, like porpoises, are no less beautiful or streamlined than the novels, the grand liners, they escort to sea.” Ernest Hilbert on John Updike • Contemporary Poetry Review

“The will to believe passionately in the fictions of poetry is not always hostage to the salvation schemes of the overchurched and the intellectually naïve.” John Palattella • The Nation

“Artists are more capable than theorists or pundits in representing the consciousness of the people.” Rachel Galvin • Academy of American Poets “What is it in art that we care about?” Anna James • Financial Times

“Larkin needs to be bad so that we can stay good.” David Orr • Poetry, via Poetry Daily

“Scenes from Comus offers, in Geoffrey Hill’s own phrase, ‘a grand and crabby music’.” Colin Burrows • The Guardian

“Who doesn't want to have more heroes? Who doesn't want to be as inspired as possible?” The hum inside the skull, revisited • The New York Times

“Poetry was magic and prose paid the bills.” Tomás Graves talks to Sue Steward • The Daily Telegraph

“For those who will never have heard Isaiah Berlin’s uniquely dazzling conversation, reading his correspondence is the next best thing.” A. J. Sherman • New England Review

“Irony permeates Emmanuel Moses’s world, even in moments meant to be gravely self-inquisitive or highly romantic.” Jewish poetry gets its breakout star, by Jake Marmer • The Forward

“The unreasonableness of war, the killing of children, drives me to distraction.” C.K. Williams talks to Chris Hedges • The New York Times

“Farewell to my one and only kissin’ cousin.” Jonathan Williams • The Independent

“Despite his labyrinthine erudition, Umberto Eco has difficulty bringing his mind into contact with reality.” John Carey • The Sunday Times

“So many American folk ballads carry the sting of death.” Greil Marcus • Los Angeles Times “Death is what gets poets up in the morning.” Megan Harlan on Sandra M. Gilbert and Medbh McGuckian • San Francisco Chronicle

“What they’re doing is legal terrorism.” Tarzan Presley v. the corporate copyright machine • NZ Listener

“Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it.” Adam Gopnik • The New Yorker

“I was really tired of all this stuff about the Beats and everybody who was so stuck in their San Francisco identity.” Wendy Lesser on The Threepenny Review • San Francisco Chronicle

“Hurried novels often possess an excitement and passion that survive the journey from the writer’s mind to the reader’s mind.” Meg Wolitzer • The Washington Post

“The eccentric little text-block that Charles Simic has called ‘the sole instance we have of squaring the circle’ is one of many options now available to young poets.” Prose poetry comes in from the margins, by Eric McHenry • The New York Times

“It’s a classic literary rise and fall, and has a lot to say about the unreliability of initial reputations.” Leigh Hunt, by Andrew Motion • The Guardian

“Our language should be a playground; instead we make it into a minefield.” William Deresiewicz • The New York Times

ALSO: Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus • John Montague’s Drunken Sailor • Guy Davenport, RIP

“Lyn Hejinian and her fellow practitioners promote a cult-like worship of the idea that everyone and everything is equal, that no poem shall be left behind.” Joan Houlihan on The Best American Poetry 2004 • Boston Comment

“Things can never be said completely, as these poems so bountifully show.” David McCooey on The Best Australian Poetry 2004 and The Best Australian Poems 2004 • The Age

“The sestina is the one form that poets from all camps can write and appreciate.” Daniel Nester • Poets & Writers

“Joe Brainard’s art is bright with good will toward the world.” William Corbett • Boston Phoenix

“I don’t especially subscribe to the notion of a hierarchy in high and low culture. One nourishes the other.” August Kleinzahler talks to Adam Travis • Bookslut

“Our present-day situation, where poetry is only poetry and nothing more than poetry, is much more positive.” An interview with three Russian writers • Nipposkiss

“We all have our well-stocked private libraries of treasured endings, and plenty of exasperating ones as well.” Steven Winn • San Francisco Chronicle

“When, exactly, did filial piety cease to be a virtue, and become instead, if not a vice exactly, at least a character defect or a handicap?” Samuel Butler's unhappy youth, by Anthony Daniels • The New Criterion

“Patrick Kavanagh belongs all over the place, high and low, far and wide.” Seamus Heaney • The Guardian

FOR EARLIER ITEMS, VISIT THE 2004 ARCHIVES

New poems