(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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]