About Garrick Davis

A few years ago, for the brief span of a few classes, I attended a poetry workshop class at Boston University. Though I was not formally enrolled in the class, the teacher had generously invited me to attend-and since the teacher was one of the great living masters of the art I accepted, though it [...]

  Book of the Year: The Collected Poems of Donald Justice (Knopf) Runner-Up: Second Space by Czeslaw Milosz (Ecco). Inner Voices: Selected Poems by Richard Howard (FSG). Granted, this is not a daring choice. Donald Justice was beloved as a poet and teacher by several generations of American poets. Still, we’ll leave it to other [...]

An Interview with the Editors of Foetry Conducted by: Garrick Davis Interviewer’s Note: This year, a new website was launched in the National Poetry Month of April-not to publish poetry or fiction, but to examine the ethics of the poetry world. With its mission of exposing fraudulent book contests, and corrupt judging practices, the editors [...]

Reviewed: The Cantos by Ezra Pound (Fourth Collected edition). Faber and Faber, 1987. A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Carroll F. Terrell. University of California Press, 1980. No long poem of the twentieth century has been the subject of more debate than TheCantos by Ezra Pound. It is, by common consent, one [...]

Book of the Year: The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (FSG) Runners-Up: The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes, edited by Paul Keegan (FSG); “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate (FSG) The story of the year was summed up in two words: Robert [...]

In the world of American poetry, getting a call from Dana Gioia is like getting blessed by the Pope. This spring, I received that benediction when he invited me to West Chester, Pennsylvania, for the 9th Annual Conference on Exploring Form & Narrative in Poetry.  Gioia, himself a poet and critic (and now Chairman of [...]

On the Relation of His Criticism to His Poetry As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis There are two Eliots, the poet and the critic, which bear a curious relation to one another. Only the latter, that poet-critic descended from the line of Johnson, Coleridge, and Arnold shall be addressed here, whose achievements are hardly inferior to [...]

Reviewed: The Roots of Treason by E. Fuller Torrey. McGraw-Hill, 1984. 339 pp. The Genealogy of Demons by Robert Casillo. Northwestern University Press, 1988. 463 pp. The American Ezra Pound by Wendy Stallard Flory. Yale University Press, 1989. 230pp. Even in a supposedly enlightened age, superstitions abound concerning literature: one of the foremost being that [...]

Futurism, the great European art movement of the early 20th century, found an audience of one in the industrialized new world, and that was Hart Crane. He was not the first American poet to be comfortable in the modern world, nor was he the first to use its imagery in his poems: that would be [...]

Click here to read The Sacred Wood by T. S. Eliot free of charge. As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis “I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written.” –Randall Jarrell I. A Renaissance begins, if it begins at all, in the unlikeliest of [...]