“Is That Really the Best You Can Do?” Quincy Lehr on Poetry and Personal Style
When Solon declared that he learned something new every day (or was it Pericles?—some dead Greek guy, at any rate), he perhaps was not thinking of the utility of the Pratt-Shelby Knot when trying to keep a leather tie proportional enough that the thin end does not emerge at an inconvenient and insistent angle. However, [...]
Preface: Second Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism
Last July, a distinguished group of poets who are also critics gathered at Western State College of Colorado, in Gunnison, for the Second Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism. The Symposium is part of Writing the Rockies, a conference affiliated with Western’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. As was the case last year, the [...]
Sources of Delight: What We Respond to When We Respond to Poetry by Jan Schreiber
When I was seventeen years old and barely aware of poetry, with no idea what good poetry might be, or even what if anything might please me, a friend, just back from his English class, rushed breathlessly into my room at boarding school, book in hand, and cried, “Listen to this!”I caught this morning morning’s [...]
The “I” as Great Imposter: Confession, Monologue & Persona by Joan Houlihan
After his reading, the poet was approached by a tearful woman. She thanked him for the poem about his brother who had died. “My brother died recently,” she said, “and I sympathize with your feelings about your brother’s death.” “Oh, thanks,” the poet said, “but I don’t have a brother.” Why is this story disturbing? [...]
These Are the Poems, Folks: On the Relationship Between Poetry and Joke-telling by David Yezzi
Stand-up comedian Tony Campanelli confessed Monday to the Feb. 26 killing of 180 comedy-club patrons during a performance at Crack-Ups in Royal Oak. . . . “Man, I killed ’em,” the 33-year-old Campanelli told Royal Oak police interrogators. “You shoulda seen them rolling out there. I really knocked ’em dead. . . .” —The Onion, [...]
A Neglected Master in Our Midst: Bill Coyle on Daryl Hine
19 December 2011
Reviewed: Recollected Poems by Daryl Hine. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2009. 246 pages.& by Daryl Hine. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2010. 112 pages. When Daryl Hine’s Recollected Poems was published in 2009 it marked something of a comeback for a poet who in the mid 1990s had turned his back on the publishing industry and begun posting his new poems on a website, through which he also accepted donations. It was hard, at least for those of us who have grown up in a book culture, not to see this as a comedown. A poet’s poet, and an unfashionable on at that, Hine had never been exactly famous, even by poetry standards. Still, he had published for decades with venerable houses like Athenaeum and Knopf, established himself as [...]
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A Formal Feeling Comes: Anthony Hecht’s Elegaic Forms by David Rothman
23 November 2011
Those who condemn form in poetry are often given to venting their wrath upon…received forms, and often chiefly on the grounds that they coerce the mind, limit the imagination, force language with Procrustean barbarity into set molds. But in fact our greatest formal poets—Donne, Herbert, Campion, Herrick, and Hardy—rarely embrace received forms apart from the sonnet. What they so conspicuously and brilliantly do is to invent forms of their own. This means that with such a poem the poet is free to create whatever pattern and music he cares for; but in each subsequent stanza of that poem the original music and pattern must be religiously observed. And in following a pattern of his own invention, the poet is being as obedient as he would [...]
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Too Cool for School: G. M. Palmer on Broetry
20 October 2011
Reviewed: Broetry by Brian McGackin. Quirk Books, 2011. $12.95Broetry’s title jumps into a spot your mind didn’t know was there. Sure, you know “bros” and you know “poetry,” and it somehow seems more than natural for a book called Broetry to appear in your hands. And when it does appear, the first thing you notice is that, unlike nearly every other publication of poetry, Broetry is a real book. It’s a nicely sized (5×7.5) hardback with a beautifully embossed cover, a refreshing aesthetic relief from the common flimsy, perfect-bound books of poetry that must litter some unlucky remainder store.The cover includes a poem that riffs on William Carlos Williams:I have finishedthe beerthat was inthe icebox. . .forgive methis girl came overA riff that, perhaps unintentionally, [...]
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Anchor in the Shadows: Bill Coyle on Tomas Tranströmer
06 October 2011
(Editor’s Note: As it was announced today that Tomas Tranströmer had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the editors of the CPR thought it fitting to re-post this fine review of his work by Bill Coyle from 2009.)Reviewed: The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton. New Directions Books, 2006. Every year, as the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature approaches, partisans of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer hold a collective breath, hoping against hope. A win for their man is unlikely for a number of reasons. One is the residual fallout from 1974 when the Swedish Academy gave the prize to two of its own members, Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson. Both were fine writers, but the appearance of [...]
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The Lighter Side: Quincy Lehr on Selling Your Poetry Book
04 October 2011
(Author’s note: No science was involved in the writing of this essay; nor was there any systematic process of interviews. No, this is based on firm anecdotal evidence, told to me by various poets in various stages of sobriety over the course of several years, as well as my own experiences since my first book appeared in 2008. If you get a book deal you’ll be in for something like what I’m about to describe. It may go a bit better for you. In some cases, it could be worse. But it’s generally something like this.) One hears, with some regularity, about how poets would sell scads of books if they just went “out there” to move copies. Now, one does not hear this from publishers, [...]
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Without a Net: Ernest Hilbert on Optic, Graphic, Acoustic, and Other Formations in Free Verse
09 September 2011
The present survey is provisional and intended to serve as only the merest introduction to a vast and extraordinarily complex field, one that commands broad, ongoing attention. Useful examples and additions are welcome and may be entered in the comments section below the article.[1] An earlier version of this essay was given as a talk in the poetry symposium of “Writing the Rockies,” a conference sponsored by Western State College of Colorado in July 2011. Click on embedded images to enlarge. You may also listen along to the author’s recordings of the essay by using the embedded audio players. Introduction to Without a Net read by the authorerhaps the single most famous saying about free verse is Robert Frost’s curmudgeonly observation that writing it is like [...]
Posted in Essays, November 2011: Poetry Criticism Conference, This MonthComments (15)
Good Bone Structure: Maryann Corbett on Charles Martin
01 September 2011
Reviewed: Signs and Wonders by Charles Martin. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 74 pages.To publish a collection of new poems late in a distinguished career is a slightly anxious proposition, both for the poet and for readers. This is even more true when the previous book, nine years old now, was a “new and selected,” a gleaning of the best from previous books, along with a section of new work, looking like the summing up of a whole oeuvre. The anxious question is not, Can he still do it? As the poet’s interests shift, perhaps sharpening, perhaps deepening, we also want to know if he will still train his eye on the same matters that meant so much to us before.That at least was [...]
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Adventures in Scholarship: Garrick Davis on the Textbook Understanding Poetry
01 August 2011
Reviewed: Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. 1st edition, 1938. 2nd edition, 1950. 3rd edition, 1960. 4th edition, 1976. What was the most important literature textbook of the 20th century? A work by two associate professors at Louisiana State University, it turns out, which went through four editions, and which made millions for them. Understanding Poetry—which by its second edition had already been adopted by over 250 colleges and universities—is one of the great landmarks in that rite of spring, or forced march, that we call the undergraduate survey course. For more than 40 years, hapless college freshman were assigned this tome (680 pages, minimum) as their one great rope to climb the unfamiliar crags of Parnassus; the radioactive-orange cover of the fourth [...]
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An American Way to Go: John Foy on Peter Balakian
26 July 2011
Reviewed: Ziggurat by Peter Balakian. University of Chicago Press, 2010.Peter Balakian’s poetry is a “strange brew of wind and light” distilled to one degree or another from primal trauma. He’s as American as Walt Whitman and Joe Namath, a product of high school football teams in the affluent New Jersey suburbs, but he is not an optimist. As scholar and memoirist, Balakian has dug deep over the years into his rich Armenian past, and what he has found has darkened his sensibility. His poetry, like his highly acclaimed prose, reaches back to Armenian themes of trauma and genocide, just as it keeps a foot in the present with its own attendant terrors. Balakian has faced these things and written about them, directly or indirectly, through [...]
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Rick Joines on the Gravity and Levity of Kay Ryan
18 July 2011
Reviewed: The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan. Grove Press, 2011. 288 pages. $14.95.Kay Ryan’s pulling-herself-up-by-her-own-muddied-Blundstone-bootstraps-story is already the stuff of legend. After writing and publishing poems for 20 years or so in relative obscurity, in this last decade she became the darling of Poetry Magazine, won a Guggenheim and the Ruth Lilly in 2004, was named United States Poet Laureate in 2008, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, she is popular and is a poetry “best seller” like Mary Oliver, with whom she has many things in common (style and subject matter not being two of them). Both are read by people who don’t [...]
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- The Well-Wrought Void: Joan Houlihan on Christian Wiman
- The Lighter Side: Five Lessons from AWP (Or, Why We Hate Poetry Readings)
- Without a Net: Ernest Hilbert on Optic, Graphic, Acoustic, and Other Formations in Free Verse
- The Lighter Side: Quincy Lehr on Selling Your Poetry Book
- The Lighter Side: Why We Still Hate Poetry Readings
- Short Cuts: Joan Houlihan on Ange Mlinko
- The CPR Editors: We Comment on the Comments
- "Is That Really the Best You Can Do?" Quincy Lehr on Poetry and Personal Style
- Too Cool for School: G. M. Palmer on Broetry
- The Lighter Side: Norman Stock Knows Our Pain
- “Is That Really the Best You Can Do?” Quincy Lehr on Poetry and Personal Style
- A Neglected Master in Our Midst: Bill Coyle on Daryl Hine
- Preface: Second Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism
- A Formal Feeling Comes: Anthony Hecht’s Elegaic Forms by David Rothman
- Sources of Delight: What We Respond to When We Respond to Poetry by Jan Schreiber
- The “I” as Great Imposter: Confession, Monologue & Persona by Joan Houlihan
- Too Cool for School: G. M. Palmer on Broetry
- These Are the Poems, Folks: On the Relationship Between Poetry and Joke-telling by David Yezzi
- Anchor in the Shadows: Bill Coyle on Tomas Tranströmer
- The Lighter Side: Quincy Lehr on Selling Your Poetry Book
- John Foy: Dear R: If you liked Ziggurat, you would very like...
- Tim Murphy: Quincy showed up for a reading of mine in Massachu...
- Bill: Well, dang! So much for this closetful of Zegna su...
- Renee Watkins: Why would you want to resemble, let alone, publish...
- James Dickson: So, I'm linebacker-sized and I favor bow ties. Do...
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