It’s All Argentinian to Arturo Desimone

I knew a poet who could only write his poems with a stub of a pencil. Nothing else worked for him as well. His family and friends bought him fountain pens, ballpoints, typewriters...

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.

I didn’t grow up speaking much Spanish. My father doesn’t speak it, and in California, my mother was some 3,500 miles away from her Puerto Rican family...

The fifth (and final) definition of “revision” in the OED is “the fact of seeing a person or thing again; an instance of this; a fresh or new vision of something.”

When reading Sylvia Plath’s private writing – her letters, her diaries – one always wonders just what her life would have been like had she been born in 1942 rather than in 1932.

Larkin really was a hermit. He disliked virtually everyone who worked for the university, and especially those in my department.

In the tumultuous period that began in the late 1910s and ended in the late 1940s, poet-critics began to consolidate their cultural gains by making a durable place for literary modernism in the American social order.

Eileen Myles sits at a small café in the East Village, near the apartment they have called home for 40 years. Myles, who now prefers to use gender-neutral pronouns...

It was 2000. We were very, very poor, living in Elizabeth, NJ, and life was very much by-the-paycheck. Bear with me here; we're going to talk sob-story and then move onto the bigger picture.

This past Sunday, September 3, brought the very sad news that John Ashbery had passed away at the age of 90. Ashbery has long been regarded as the greatest and most influential living American poet.

It was a startling thing to me to realize that the African Americans in my college were so different from the Nigerians I had grown up with.

As a poetic symbol, the scar might seem to be hopelessly banal and overwrought. For Mara Pastor, the scar is not just a symbol for romantic pain...

The friendship between Shahane and Kolatkar began in the late 1950s, in Pune. Shahane had gone to Pune for college, but formal education was not for him.

Like many people, I discovered Raymond Pettibon’s artwork through his ink drawings that were used on a few SST Records album covers, most notably Black Flag’s Slip It In, which my neighbor had somehow procured in 1984.

“My own autobiography has never interested me very much,” John Ashbery once told an interviewer. “Whenever I try to think about it, I seem to draw a complete blank.”

Sinners always make the greatest Christian writers. Last month we lost one of the greatest, who was also a self-declared “criminal hedonist.”

My daughter is ten. She doesn’t know about boys yet and she wants to be a star of some undetermined variety — an opera singer or actor maybe. She is beautiful in every way the word beautiful signifies itself, with brown skin that gets some red in it under the summer...

What is a lost city? The vanished metropolises of myth and history are one sort: Atlantis plunged into the sea, Troy razed, ghost towns littered across the American West.