(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 by, departments and institutions on which we have fastened them…” – R. V. Cassill (the founder of AWP, in his address to the convention at its 15th anniversary)“The Creative Writing experiment is now a generation old. It has been thoroughly tested and explored in every conceivable way and has proved, in my opinion, a colossal failure. Commons sense dictates that it should be abandoned.” –Karl Shapiro“…the academically certified Creative Writer goes out [...]

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 the unknown friend or relative who served as the inspiration or subject. Like we care.• As I recall, there was only one elegy, that being for a poet.• Indeed, the only people mentioned, living or dead, were either poets (often portrayed reverently) or leaders (almost invariably shown in a negative, political light).• What little humor was in evidence usually amounted to that desiccated, self-conscious, congratulatory intertext. “Oh, did you see how I [...]

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 the still new Copernican Cosmology had introduced, and with squaring that cosmology with Biblical narrative, than with animal suffering, but he does describe how,Beast now with Beast gan war, and Fowle with Fowle,And Fish with Fish; to graze the Herb all leaving,Devourd each other; nor stood much in aweOf Man, but fled him, or with count’nance grimGlar’d on him passing…   (710-714)Milton, God love him, didn’t know the half of it. It [...]

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 [...]

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 begun posting his new poems on a website, through which he also accepted donations. It was hard, at least for those of us who have grown up in a book culture, not to see this as a comedown. A poet’s poet, and an unfashionable on at that, Hine had never been exactly famous, even by poetry standards. Still, he had published for decades with venerable houses like Athenaeum and Knopf, established himself as [...]

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 goal of the Symposium, which we jointly chair, is to pay the closest possible attention to poetry criticism in itself, to articulate and reconsider the principles on which we operate. Each speaker is given half an hour to present a paper and then, for the remainder of the hour, a lively discussion ensues involving the speaker, the symposium participants, and members of the public. Our goal is nothing less than [...]

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 sonnet. What they so conspicuously and brilliantly do is to invent forms of their own. This means that with such a poem the poet is free to create whatever pattern and music he cares for; but in each subsequent stanza of that poem the original music and pattern must be religiously observed. And in following a pattern of his own invention, the poet is being as obedient as he would [...]

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 [...]

After his reading, the poet was approached by a tearful woman. She thanked him for the poem about his brother who had died. “My brother died recently,” she said, “and I sympathize with your feelings about your brother’s death.” “Oh, thanks,” the poet said, “but I don’t have a brother.” Why is this story disturbing? If a fiction writer were reading from an I-based story in which a relative died, no one would be surprised or upset that the I in the story wasn’t the I of the writer. However, although every poetry workshop tries to imbue the poet with the idea that the “I” in a poem is not the real I—that it is not actually the poet speaking—no one listening to or reading [...]

Reviewed: Broetry by Brian McGackin. Quirk Books, 2011. $12.95Broetry’s title jumps into a spot your mind didn’t know was there. Sure, you know “bros” and you know “poetry,” and it somehow seems more than natural for a book called Broetry to appear in your hands. And when it does appear, the first thing you notice is that, unlike nearly every other publication of poetry, Broetry is a real book. It’s a nicely sized (5×7.5) hardback with a beautifully embossed cover, a refreshing aesthetic relief from the common flimsy, perfect-bound books of poetry that must litter some unlucky remainder store.The cover includes a poem that riffs on William Carlos Williams:I have finishedthe beerthat was inthe icebox. . .forgive methis girl came overA riff that, perhaps unintentionally, [...]