Marian Janssen on John Berryman

Letters are always self-involved, but Berryman’s are often insufferably self-obsessed, even if they are meant to be letters of condolence...
Read MoreMarian Janssen on Elizabeth Bishop

Thomas Travisano paints a structured, sensitive portrait of Bishop. He is at his best when explaining her work, which he immaculately interweaves with her life.
Read MoreJessica Sequeira: Two Augurs

Archaic, oracular and paradoxical , inspired by studies of occult philosophy yet destined for a wider readership unacquainted with these currents , this collection of poems by Olga Acevedo
Read MorePoet Times

The poet is born in squalor, his first love. Some of the poet’s favorite words include seedy, shabby, seamy.
Read MoreAmit Majmudar on Anthony Madrid

Not all limericks are not-quite-nonsense, but the most limerickish ones are. As Anthony Madrid, author of a new collection of limericks illustrated by Mark Fletcher, says in a short essay...
Read MoreCry On My Stomach

The title of Elaine Kahn’s new collection, Romance or The End (Soft Skull Press, 2020), feels like an ultimatum. Traditionally—heteronormatively—the end comes just after the wedding
Read MoreWriting Differently

Danilo Kiš famously observed that the western bracketing of Balkan literature as narrowly ‘political’ rested on a set of mutually reinforcing stereotypes.
Read MoreA loss in the vocabulary of attention…

I am 18 years old. It’s the first week of college. I’m sitting in the third row. The classroom is overflowing — students are spilling out of benches, their voices bigger than their bodies — when the professor walks in.
Read MoreAss as Raw Heart

Over more than three decades and thirteen books of poems, Carl Phillips has been conducting an inquiry into intimacy, especially sexual intimacy...
Read MoreEd Simon on Sean Bonney

Prophets often die before their time, usually when the rest of us need their voices most. This was the fate of the English radical poet Sean Bonney, who died last November
Read MoreDeep, slow moving darkness!

Tucked on a side street in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood is Foyer, a small store specializing in plants, stationery, and “treasures.” On a bleak January day I stopped in for a couple of tillandsia and succulents...
Read MoreWere has the butterfly flown?

As Randall Jarrell once wrote of Walt Whitman, “baby critics who have barely learned to complain of the lack of ambiguity in Peter Rabbit can tell you all that is wrong with Leaves of Grass.”
Read MoreJessica Sequeira: Gloss on a Betel Nut

Fodder: cows and horses eat the stuff, dried hay or straw, but what is it exactly? A beige substance to be consumed and excreted, a material to be burnt, pure fuel.
Read MoreMedha Singh on Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz grants himself the permission to write long poems, and in doing so he grants it to all the imitators he knows his work will engender.
Read MoreCavafy wrote his poetry here…

I arrived in Istanbul with the hope of solving a literary mystery. Like many readers before me, I wanted to locate the house where Cavafy had lived...
Read MoreThe prose poem is one of the most abiding whatabouts…

It’s the insiders—the poets, the tenured—who like to “problematize” poetry and wield their whatabouts.
Read MoreTriple Bluffs by Jessica Sequeira

Two books about solitary poets travelling the Mediterranean and writing poems came my way within a relatively short period of time; it made sense to treat them within the same space.
Read MoreAndrew Epstein: John Ashbery, Jordan Ellenberg and Math

To my surprise, in the car the other day my math-obsessed 14-year-old son Dylan suddenly exclaimed “John Ashbery!” from the backseat. It turns out he’d reached the last pages of Jordan Ellenberg's...
Read MorePoetry Oblivion Evito-Meter

What is your favourite lost poem? There’s a lot of material (not) out there to choose from, from the lost plays of Aeschylus to the discarded hospital poems of Anne Sexton and Ivan Blatný.
Read MoreEarliest Gestures

I can never go back and know what, as an infant, I first felt, what my original sensations were, nor can I recapture the initial experience of moving, of being touched
Read MoreMichael Gottlieb on Drew Gardner

Ronald Reagan dies, goes to hell, eventually earns his horns and pitchfork and comes back up here to bedevil us again. It’s years later now.
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
Read MoreIf duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
Read MoreBurton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read MoreI’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
Read MoreThe cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
Read MoreIf duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
Read MoreBurton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read MoreI’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
Read MoreThe cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
Read More