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, after futzing around with the Windsor and half-Windsor (which rather vitiate the point of wearing a leather tie, don’t they?), I am quite convinced I’m right. I make no apologies for that. The tediously ubiquitous Seth Abramson recently wrote in an essay on corruption in poetry that: “If you spend even 10% of the energy you spend on your writing on efforts to be a hipster in dress or manner or [...]

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 minion, king-dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his ridingOf the rolling level | underneath him steady air, and stridingHigh there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing . . .and I felt a chill go up my spine. Poetry could do that? Sometimes it takes a spectacular gesture to get one’s attention. In the more than fifty years since, I’ve come to appreciate—and strive in my [...]

(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, [...]

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 [...]

1. Precursors / chronological by countryA) EnglandGascoigne, George.  “Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English…” In The Posies of George Gascoigne. London: Richard Smith, 1575.[1]Puttenham, George.  The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition. 1589.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.Lancelot, Claude. Quatre Traitez de Pöesies Latine, Françoise, Italienne, et Espagnole. 1663.Poole, Joshua.  The English Parnassus: Or, a Helpe to English Poesie. London: 1657; 2nd ed. 1677.Bysshe, Edward.  The Art of English Poetry.  Containing I. Rules for making VERSES.  II.  A Collection of the most Natural, Agreeable, and Sublime THOUGHTS, viz. Allusions, Similes, Descriptions and Characters, of Persons and Things, that are to be found in the best ENGLISH POETS.  III. A Dictionary of RHYMES. London, 1702, 1705, 1708, [...]

Few fields have ever been transformed by bibliographical work in the way that literary prosody was changed by the publication of T. V. F. Brogan’s English Versification, 1570 – 1980: A Reference Guide with a Global Appendix (or “EVRG” to its admirers).  It is no exaggeration to say that what Brogan accomplished is comparable to what Samuel Johnson did when he wrote his dictionary.  Over the course of three years, Brogan read, organized, indexed, cross-indexed, and pithily critiqued over 6,000 works of literary prosody in 15 categories (recording his observations…on index cards), a feat never accomplished (or even undertaken) in the history of a field that stretches back at least to Plato and Aristotle.  Although Brogan focuses on English, he also includes more than 2,000 [...]

(An Occasional Series: Part One)    Poems reviewed in this article: “From a Window” by Christian Wiman, from the Atlantic (July/August 2008). Reprinted with permission of the author.“Gesundheit” by Robyn Sarah, from Maisonneuve (Summer 2008). “Gesundheit” is in Sarah’s forthcoming collection Pause for Breath (Biblioasis, 2009), and reprinted with permission of the publisher.“Infomercial 2,” by John Ashbery; “When the Fog,” by August Kleinzahler; and “The Polling Place” by Joshua Mehigan, from the New York Times Online (November 4, 2008).“Forty Acres,” by Derek Walcott, from the Times Online (November 5, 2008).“Selected Monsters,” by Steven Heighton, from the London Review of Books (July 3, 2008). Reprinted with permission of the author. Recently, I asked the American poet Samuel Menashe what he was reading—a simple enough question, I thought. If you’re [...]

In 2008, Horace Engdahl, chair of the Swedish Academy that awards the Noble Prize Committee in Literature, made a fair point when he said that Americans “don’t translate enough,” as one of the reasons why few Americans are on the short list for the prize. Alas, that’s true in regard to literature in many languages. But Polish presents some unique problems, some of them perhaps obvious, which helps explain why you are just now hearing of Eugeniusz Tkaczszyn-Dycki.1) We have loved Polish poets for their moral glamour more than we have appreciated the poetry itself. It is indisputable that Poland has one of the richest poetic traditions in Europe. And it’s not as though Poland produced great poetry only under the yoke of Communism. So [...]

Why Quality Control in Poetry Need Not Be Blindsided by TraditionalismAs Reviewed By: James RotherFor decades now, responsible elements within the critical community have disagreed over how to save American poetry from itself. The matter vs. antimatter struggle pitting “strong measures” Parnassians against anything-goes free versers has lost little of its rancor after more than a half-century’s wrangling. Hardly anyone remembers when the battle-not-so-royal between Tweeds and Sandals first broke out, it was so long ago. Even through the “who gives a damn” ‘70s, poor relations between the two schools were the rule, and this persisted past the formalist revival of the ‘80s up to the attempt made by the present journal seven years ago to retrieve the ball dropped by Hilton Kramer’s The New [...]

Concerning Some Recent Versions of the Metamorphoses by Ovid.As Reviewed By: James Rother[Unless otherwise attributed, all translations are the author’s.]It is remarkable, but hardly strange, that the works of Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (better known as Ovid [43 B.C.-17 A.D.], and spanning the emperies of Augustus and Tiberius), have been enjoying a revival lately, with translations into English of the most famous of his poems, Metamorphoses, nearly matching those of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey over the last few decades. Not bad for a 15-book poem, numbering some 12,000 lines, composed by one of the deadest of dead white males and set forth in a language only slightly less moribund since the onset of the vernacular Roman Catholic liturgy and revised bar exam than Gaelic [...]