The Lighter Side: What Did Neruda Know?
20 April 2012
We have all heard the story of an aged Pablo Neruda at a poetry reading, turning down a request to perform a poem from the earlier days of his career, citing a failing memory. There were plenty of copies of it at hand, but the Chilean poet wouldn’t countenance anything as unprofessional as reading his [...]
Posted in Editor, This MonthComments (1)
A Claptrap Canon: On the Modern Canadian Poets Anthology by Zachariah Wells
20 April 2012
Reviewed: Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology of Poems in English. Todd Swift and Evan Jones, editors. Carcanet Press, 2010. 260 pages, $32.95 Anthologies, particularly those dedicated to presenting the poetry of a particular stretch of geopolitical space-time, are, by necessity, Procrustean beds. Thousands of poets producing work over many decades get pruned to a [...]
Posted in Home Page, Reviews, This MonthComments (1)
The Lighter Side: Happy Anniversary, AWP!
22 February 2012
(Here’s a salute to Creative Writing programs from our poets and critics, past and present, culled from various interviews and essays.) “Abolish the M.F.A.! What a ringing slogan for a new Cato: Iowa delenda est!” – Donald Hall “We are now at the point where writing programs are poisoning, and in turn we are being poisoned [...]
Posted in Editor, This MonthComments (5)
The Lighter Side: How to Prepare for AWP
09 February 2012
I have attended dozens of poetry readings. Virtually all of them were identical: • The introductions made me think I was about to witness the second coming of John Donne. • All of the “poems” were preceded by tedious, unhelpful explanations. Typically, these involved the author’s state of intoxication when they wrote this stuff or [...]
Posted in Editor, This MonthComments (1)
Monsters All the Way Down: Bill Coyle on Bruce Taylor
06 February 2012
Reviewed: No End in Strangeness: New and Selected Poems by Bruce Taylor. Cormorant Books, 2011. There’s a marvelous description in Book X of Paradise Lost of the astronomical and climatological changes that accompany the Fall, and of the beginnings of predation among the animals. Milton is more concerned there with the vast scales that [...]
Posted in Reviews, This MonthComments (1)
“Is That Really the Best You Can Do?” Quincy Lehr on Poetry and Personal Style
17 January 2012
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, [...]
Posted in Essays, This MonthComments (7)
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 [...]
Posted in Reviews, This MonthComments (1)
Preface: Second Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism
23 November 2011
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 [...]
Posted in November 2011: Poetry Criticism Conference, This MonthComments (0)
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 [...]
Posted in November 2011: Poetry Criticism Conference, This MonthComments (1)
Sources of Delight: What We Respond to When We Respond to Poetry by Jan Schreiber
23 November 2011
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 [...]
Posted in Essays, November 2011: Poetry Criticism Conference, This MonthComments (1)
- Subscribe
- Popular
- Latest
- Comments
- Tags
Stay up to date
- Subscribe to the RSS Feed
- The Lighter Side: What Did Neruda Know?
- A Claptrap Canon: On the Modern Canadian Poets Anthology by Zachariah Wells
- The Lighter Side: Happy Anniversary, AWP!
- The Lighter Side: How to Prepare for AWP
- Monsters All the Way Down: Bill Coyle on Bruce Taylor
- “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
Newsletter Signup
