About David Yezzi

David Yezzi’s poetry collections include Azores (2008) and The Hidden Model (2003), and his criticism and poetry have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Best American Poetry. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Yezzi is Executive Editor of The New Criterion. He has also edited The Swallow Anthology of New American Poetry (2009). His libretto for a chamber opera by composer David Conte, Firebird Motel, premiered in 2003 and was released on CD by Arsis (2007). Poet-critic Adam Kirsch, who selected Azores as one of Slate’s Best Books of 2008, noted that Yezzi’s poetry “displays a civilized mastery reminiscent of Philip Larkin and Donald Justice, which no poet of his generation can match.” David Yezzi is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University and received his MFA from Columbia University.

David Yezzi Has written the following articles:

These Are the Poems, Folks: On the Relationship Between Poetry and Joke-telling by David Yezzi

Posted on 12 October 2011

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, [...]

Posted in November 2011: Poetry Criticism Conference, This MonthComments (0)

The Rest Is Criticism

Posted on 21 November 2010

Time was when there was too much criticism around. Randall Jarrell thought so, when, in the early Fifties, he pronounced it “the bane of our age.” Auden, whose fourth doorstop volume of collected prose recently appeared from Princeton, was similarly disenchanted. In The Dyer’s Hand, Auden announced that, when his daydream College for Bards convened, [...]

Posted in November 2010: Poetry Criticism Conference, This MonthComments (5)

Thomas M., Meet Tom

Posted on 01 September 2008

Thomas M. Disch. The Priest: A Gothic Romance. Alfred A. Knopf 1995. 352 pp. Tom Disch. Dark Verses & Light. The Johns Hopkins University Press 1991. 144 pp. Tom Disch. Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems. The Johns Hopkins University Press 1989. 112 pp. Thomas M. Disch. The Tale of Dan De Lion. (Drawings by [...]

Posted in Featured, Reviews, September 2008: Tom Disch Memorial IssueComments (0)

CPR Classic Readings: “At Melville’s Tomb”

Posted on 29 March 2007

As Reviewed By: David Yezzi There is an anecdote, too good not to be true, recounted by William Jay Smith, about a soused Hart Crane sidling up to the poet Witter Bynner in Mexico City and hissing, “Witter Bynner, you’re going to have a bitter winter.” Crane’s poem “Passage” refers to a “too well known [...]