A Politics of Mere Being by Carl Phillips

A Russian poet died in North Carolina, on Friday. His name was Naum Korzhavin.

It’s early on a Sunday morning in January of 2010. I sit on the edge of the bed, already dressed, with my hand on my partner’s foot as he sleeps. The night before, I couldn’t catch my breath, and I told myself that if I felt the same in...

Michael Hofmann is one of the great poets of squalid student digs, and ‘Between Bed and Wastepaper Basket’ is one of his great poems.

My mother almost certainly misdelivered Rosemary Tonks’ newspaper when she was eight...

Lots of poets drank at the Fitzroy. It was a haunt of Dylan Thomas and William Empson and Nina Hammett and Malcolm Lowry; it gets a mention in Briggflatts...

This building in Warwick, now a venue for wedding ceremonies, has the distinction of being the only place where Larkin had to drudge. In 1942, his second year at Oxford, the ground floor was the Fuel Office, and he took a summer job there which he hated.

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.

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.”

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.

In Santiago there’s a stereotype I’ve heard many times, that while most Argentines are ‘big readers’, Chileans ‘don’t read’...

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.”

The presence of the political in Ashbery is not negligible, and those who would say so are not reading his work very carefully...

The five-year-old poetry book can be a lonely thing. After a hoped-for hothouse blossoming of critical conversation dies down and the book is no longer taught...

Before poetry got me a job, it intellectually and spiritually changed my world. Poetry introduced me to the person I have a child with and to my best friends...

Instagram was developed out of a project titled “Send the Sunshine” at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab...

Poet Joanne Kyger died last year on March 22 at the age of 82, leaving behind a long list of published and unpublished books...

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