Berfrois

Creation Chained to a Stunned Repose by Daniel Tobin

Creation Chained to a Stunned Repose by Daniel Tobin

You must grieve for this right now —you have to feel this sorrow now— for the world must be loved this much...

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Poets’ Houses: Sitwell, Moore, Gray

Poets’ Houses: Sitwell, Moore, Gray

When it comes to interior shots of Edith Sitwell houses, this blog certainly spoils its readers. This is the room in which she was born in 1887, currently the offices of the lively Scarborough-based Valley Press.

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Rather than vulnerably acquiescent to the drab…

Rather than vulnerably acquiescent to the drab…

In a characteristically passionate 1937 letter to a friend, the novelist Helen Anderson, Murray explains, “Hysteria is to me preferable to the pedantic oscillations of a void. I would rather be mad and bad, erratic and incomprehensible, than vulnerably acquiescent to the drab.”

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Poetry before the Fall by Ed Simon

Poetry before the Fall by Ed Simon

Spare a thought of pity for the person who has looked at the warmth of the sun and not seen him smiling, espied the mysteriousness of the moon without acknowledging her meditative melancholy, or been upon a raging ocean and not empathized with its mad fury.

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Geoffrey Hilsabeck: The Tragicomedy of Try Never

Geoffrey Hilsabeck: The Tragicomedy of Try Never

A student who later dropped my poetry class wrote to me at the beginning of spring semester: “I want to understand everything I’m familiar with and unfamiliar with. I believe a deeper understanding of poetry is where I should start.”

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2 Cups Tea

2 Cups Tea

Poet Joanne Kyger died last year on March 22 at the age of 82, leaving behind a long list of published and unpublished books...

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Milk and Money

Milk and Money

In October 2016 The Bookseller reported the highest-ever annual sales of poetry books, ‘both in volume and value’.

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Gerardo Muñoz on Wilson Bueno

Gerardo Muñoz on Wilson Bueno

That the philosopher or the novelist has rarely withstood the moment of shipwreck in the unfolding of metaphoricity as basic substratum for existence...

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Kevin Hong on Critical Assembly

Kevin Hong on Critical Assembly

Thirty-three years in the making, Critical Assembly details the thoughts and experiences of forty-six people involved in the creation of the atomic bomb.

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Adam Staley Groves on Charmaine Chan

Adam Staley Groves on Charmaine Chan

Recently, I read The Magic Circle, then found some poems when I heard Charmaine Chan read a few excerpts. So here is a review, but it is a review by the criteria of poetry and not, literary or critical, this or that.

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