"The phrase 'unhealthy intersection' came from Conor Cruise O’Brien, who argued that art must maintain a neutral attitude to matters political and that artistic integrity can be threatened only by contamination with the body politic." John Fanning • Irish Times

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"What’s most refreshing about Grünbein’s takes on poetics is his skepticism of poetic theories, which comes off as frank and useful rather than cantankerous or partisan." Graham Foust • Ploughshares

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"If Irish poets have generally preferred Joyce’s Dublin to Yeats’s Byzantium, they have by and large chosen to work in the traditional meters and unfragmented syntax of the latter." Bill Coyle • New Criterion

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"Baudelaire is Houellebecq’s dark master in the lyrics and prose poems of The Art of Struggle." John Montague • TLS

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"Two apparently, or at least initially, unrelated texts, lineated in two columns to make up one poem, one text more conventionally introspective, the other more plotted, and grisly: the device isn't entirely new (see W. D. Snodgrass's 'After Experience Taught Me') but it's still unusual, and it comes with questions of its own." Stephen Burt • New Poetries

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"You can still rely on Myles for a reality check." Paul Muldoon and others on Flann O'Brien • Irish Times

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"The book weighs profit and loss in terms of past and present, social and political developments. But its emotional core is in 'private grief / or private fears,' its struggle to reconcile an inner life with external pressures." Fran Brearton on Leontia Flynn • Guardian

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"I invented a poet for my novel, a character called Liviu Campanu, but cut him out as he slowed the pace. I gave him a few lines of poetry, which I quite liked, so I built poems around them. Soon I found I had a small collection of his work, and he became my alter ego. I now write his poems and 'translate' them too. He's become quite popular—in fact a couple poetry critics said Campanu was the best thing about my recent book of poems, Jilted City. But he's a product—a by-product—of my novel, and he'll have his own book of poems soon." Patrick McGuinness • Booker Prize

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"Against those seemingly innovative writers who attempt to razor the traditional, subjective 'I' from their poems because they suspect it of being an illusory construct, [Robert] Duncan stands as a reminder of the primal, even anarchic, power of the lyric self. But his poems are not mere containers for expression either." Peter Campion • Poetry

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"Her very public brilliance may have worked against her over the years, for the Irish poetry world—and it is a strange old world of fortune-tellers and horse thieves—is suspicious of brilliance. It loves drunkenness, for example, or a visible impoverishment, but it hates the poet who seems to be in control all the time; especially if that self-control is attended by privileged social origins or ecstatically successful academic careers." Thomas McCarthy on Eavan Boland • Irish Examiner

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"Poets are often thought of as vague and wishy-washy, but, like scientists, they can't be. A poem can be about vagueness, but it has to be in precise relationship to vagueness if it's any good. I'm ridiculously analytical. Poetry, though, is an unsettlement." Lavinia Greenlaw • Guardian

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"[P]oetry . . . not only interrogat[es] the secrets of the present but also mourn[s] them and mak[es] sure they are part of the public record." Daniel Borzutzky in conversation with Kristin Dykstra • Bomb

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"The cultural receptiveness, the attention to history, the love poetry, the poetry of the overlooked and undervalued: all of these things exist simultaneously in his work, and the core of it all is a gift for empathy born out of a great capacity for love, 'the greatest reality.'" Peter Sirr on Pearse Hutchinson • Irish Times

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"[M]aybe their particular power, a power that can be almost scary, comes from their inability or refusal to find or accept a niche, to fit in. Certainly artists stand a better chance of becoming known and successful if they can be branded and labeled as part of a given movement, but [Raymond] Roussel was absolutely averse to all compromise." Mark Polizzotti in conversation with Mark Ford • The New Inquiry

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"[W]hen we look back at the past 10 years, we will recognize it as the decade when America slept, mired in security concerns (Will I let the airport agent touch me?) and revenge (Which Al Qaeda leader is our target today?), its citizens so absorbed in personal issues that they ignored the plain reality that power was rapidly shifting elsewhere." Marjorie Perloff • Chronicle of Higher Education

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"The ambition that has driven her for years has, at the moment of its greatest necessity, suddenly abandoned her. When her editor at the magazine asks what she plans to do after graduation, she surprises herself by skipping her usual overrehearsed litany—professor, editor, author of books of poems—and telling the truth: ‘I don’t really know.’” Emily Gould on Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar • Poetry

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"There’s a tendency in poetry of the last forty years, a decrease in paraphrasable substance, a diminution of affect and increase in aesthetic polish. This tendency leads straight to a hyperaestheticized (and campy if you ask me) kind of work that the popular kids wrote and liked five or ten years ago." Jordan Davis • The Constant Critic

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"Though The Times had described him as 'the man with the keys to the Paradise of English poetry,' his emotional and artistic energies had been drained by criticising other people’s work." Sameer Rahim on Matthew Hollis and Edward Thomas • Telegraph

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"The picture is far from idyllic or idealised. As Edward Thomas meets up with his 'mentor,' the visiting American poet, Robert Frost, the narrative bi-locates. As the poets go about their countryside 'talks-walking' about 'natural expressive rhythm' and other poetry matters, we see, often through wily Frost’s eyes, 'the English class system in action.'" Gerald Dawe • Irish Times

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"Noble, charismatic, wise: in the years since its composition, 'The Road Not Taken' has been understood by some as an emblem of individual choice and self-reliance, a moral tale in which the traveller takes responsibility for—and so effects—his own destiny. But it was never intended to be read in this way by Frost, who was well aware of the playful ironies contained within it, and would warn audiences: 'You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem—very tricky.'" Matthew Hollis • Guardian

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"There are many of us drawn to reductive fictions, though—the lie of the causal narrative, love’s ciphers, the one-dimensionality of the star in the telescope—and pretty much the only thing that really comes on like two dimensions (in a way that isn’t contingent—like paint, or gold leaf—on some third thing) is the sheet of paper. It’s a sort of impossibility, in its way. That’s why we’re wowed by things like very flat TVs, the MacBook Air, the book of poems." Don Paterson • Brick

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"Riley's Cambridge University pedigree is clear, and anyone fearing obscurity may latch on to 'Fifteen Ekelöf Incipits,' a poem that consists exclusively of 15 small black squares down the left-hand margin. The prosaic explanation for this cryptic behaviour would seem to be a last-minute copyright dispute, but British poetry today is not without black boxes of its own obscuring the scale of Riley's achievement for the larger audience it deserves." David Wheatley • Guardian

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"On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a 'tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,' as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with the employee; it was, rather, that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead." Daniel Mendelsohn • New Yorker

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"It is through Frost, [Edith Tiempo] writes, that she learned how 'the rhythm tells us how to go.' From the innate grace in the internal shifts of her poems, and her insights on the haiku, the pantun, and kakekotoba, one supposes that her own 'how' has been nurtured more by Asian, rather than Western poetry." Kristine Domingo on Edith Tiempo • High Chair

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"I’ll ask my students to read a poem, and whether they like that poem or not, to find something that they would like to steal from that poem. Whether it’s the length of the line or the way the poet handles his cæsuras, or the tone or even a particular line that could use as a quote or as an epigraph. And I do that all the time, myself. I do that to learn about other poems to learn new tricks for myself, and it’s a way of apprenticing one’s self." Kimiko Hahn in conversation with David St. Lascaux

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"The transformation of an entomological image (bees swarming from a damaged hive) to a religious, then finally a technological one (swarm of bell sounds), is a startling metaphor for the translation of beauty in a high tech age." Mark Irwin • The Offending Adam

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"[Elizabeth Bishop] is clearly not a fireworks and champagne kind of birthday girl." Magdalena Edwards • The Millions

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"He starts off with a disarming anecdote about the poet D.J. Enright, who told him that he had once gone to give a reading and taken ten of his latest books with him to sell, which he laid out on a table. He then held a reading, which went marvellously, 'the audience laughed and wept and all the rest of it.'. He went back to the table of his books with anticipatory pleasure: there were eleven." Kit Toda on Mark Ford • The Literateur

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"The poet's role has become, in the literal sense, that of a word processor, finding how best to absorb, recharge, and redistribute the language that is already there." Marjorie Perloff • Jacket2

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"His presence in American poetry is so immense that it is no hyperbole to say that Carl Phillips is an institution; when my Canadian fiancée asked what American poetry was like, I gave her Quiver of Arrows." Broc Rossell on Carl Phillips • Harvard Review

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"Large, commercial publishers and glossy magazines do not necessarily represent higher judgments of literary merit. In the short term, they might offer access to larger audiences. What they do represent—you could argue 'enforce'—is a fairly limited set of social and aesthetic choices. Saying that you should publish in the New Yorker is not merely a wish for greater success for you but an insistence that you become a different kind of poet, that you change your subject matter, your poetics, and your voice in order to find a shiny place among the hotel and jewelry ads. Saying that you should publish with Knopf has the same effect. I would be happy if on your own terms you were swooped up by either or both, but not if you tried to remodel yourself and your work to suit what you imagine they want." Michael Anania • TriQuarterly

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"Any break in the clouds saw me down tools and declare the day a holiday as we set off to explore everything from megalithic tombs and early Christian sites to the Neolithic field patterns turning up 20 feet under the blanket bog at Loughadoon. My husband was sure I had gone slightly mad and was more than once heard to murmur in his own language (Turkish) the first lines of the classical poem Asik’a Bagdat sorulma z, 'Don’t ask a poet directions how to get to Baghdad, their imagination runs beyond the horizon.'" Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill • Irish Times

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"[A] poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference." Anne Carson in conversation with Will Aitken • Paris Review

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"[John] Donne changes as you look at him: across genres (the epigram; the verse satire; the love lyric, the religious sonnet; the epithalamium; the sermon), and across roles (student of law; soldier; secretary to my Lord Egerton; husband; diplomat; theologian; cleric; living memento mori)." Robert Fraser • TLS

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"This exhilarating style marks a break, and an improvement, from most of Smith’s five earlier books." Stephen Burt on Bruce Smith • NYT

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"There are brighter moments in this treasure-trove of a book, such as his description of a visit to Yale in the 1960s by Auden, wearing 'a frayed, buttonless overcoat, which my wife insisted on mending.' And 'His luggage was an attaché case containing a large bottle of gin, a small one of vermouth, a plastic drinking cup, and a sheaf of poems.' We are told that Auden described Bloom as 'a dotty don,' and then assured him he liked dotty dons." John Montague • Irish Times

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"And Reiss has his own take on that Englishness as he notes in the poem ‘The Great’, in which one of his characters asks ‘rhetorically’, ‘You who cling to Englishness - which of you could say when Englishness / supposedly began?" Ian Pople • Manchester Review

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"But the young poets who have grown up writing on an electronic medium, something is happening to their hearing. They don’t hear. And poetry begins with the light but it has to begin with the light of hearing it. I think that is one of the conditions of poetry. I don’t think poetry is the printed word. I think poetry may, eventually, be the printed word, but it is really the spoken word to begin with." WS Merwin • Kenyon Review

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"I’m just looking for what it takes to get through the day, endlessly negotiating a combination of roles, all of which are marginal, and none of which you ever completely live up to." JT Welsch in conversation with Lee Smith and Claire Trevien • Sabotage

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"Life, this text suggests, is like that: we grumble about our fates until the cheese course comes and we try to decide which to sample." Marjorie Perloff • Codex

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“'Who knew that humus might lie beneath ‘humane’?' There is a maggot-like etymology here, as [Paul] Muldoon makes connections between words, as well as creatures, by breaking them down into their smallest parts." Laura Marsh • The New Republic

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"Disagree with me, and we have something to talk about, [Charles] Bernstein repeats time and again. In short, he is a nice guy who believes in poetry with the devotion of a devout rabbi or priest." Douglas Messerli • LARB

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"A question for the left is whether it has developed a critical vocabulary that can fully differentiate between work that generically 'stands' for politics and work that makes room to address the political spheres: literature that can expose suffering and make it seem possible to act against it, possible to see what needs to be done while expanding the possibility of seeing." David Micah Greenberg • Boston Review

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"[T]o look at the scenes outside us and around us, so potent with prompts for moment-by-moment imagining, is also to wonder what we will do to them, how they will—as we will—disappear." Stephen Burt on Allan Peterson • Boston Review

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"I fear that you and I have been made victims of a particularly stupid practical joke." Flann O'Brien on Patrick Kavanagh (1949) • Irish Times

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"Such is the danger of first books, and the first poems therein: high expectations. Onward John Beer! Leave these barren fields, cropped and rotated to extinction. There are verdancies ahead that you and we have yet undreamt of. I can see a forest for Some Trees." Bruce Bogher • The Claudius App

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"1. He offers an alternative to ethnic writing that is conceptual, innovative, and quietly defiant. 2. His view of nature is testing but indispensable. 3. He has un-Whited-Out the poetry we got. 4. His use of language exposes the inherent prejudices and cover-ups that have become embedded in it over time." John Yau on Ed Roberson • Poetry

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"Remember Nabokov’s butterflies, Larkin’s jazz, Benjamin’s postcards: have a side interest to keep you fresh for the other thing. Know when to let go." David Wheatley • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"We read to find a place to dwell on, and even in, for a time; it’s of no country I know. There are many strangers in it, including myself." David Ferry in conversation with Tess Taylor • Poetry

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"[Illuminations] is full of invocations to eerie, invented entities, strange beings inhabiting a utopia or possibly a dystopia. It feels as if it is set in the future. In any event it is unmistakably a book about the 'new'. Rimbaud speaks of 'the new harmony', 'the new men' and 'the new love'. The poet is often describing in precise detail a cityscape—but which city? London? Amsterdam?" Edmund White • TLS

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"The slogan which all the Arab uprisings that we are witnessing now used—all of them—is derived from a poem by a late Tunisian poet. Arabic people are shouting everywhere, 'the people want the collapse of the regime,' and al Shabi wrote, 'If people want life, destiny will have to obey.' In Arabic, the wording of both is very similar. Even the main slogan of the revolution is linked to early 20th century poetry." Rachael Allen • Granta

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"[P]oetry pamphlets invite us to be affected by how they look and feel. They want to be collected as much as read; there will be fewer poems for your pound, but these are likely to be presented distinctively, even eccentrically." John Greening • TLS

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"[Kay Ryan] was, and wished ever to be, 'an outsider.' Besides, she has never taken (or even taught!) a creative writing class. Those who busy themselves with such things are, she notes in all caps, 'THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.'” Rick Joines • Contemporary Poetry Review

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Two prose pieces by Elaine Bleakney and Rachel Zucker • At Length

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"If Eliot and Celan responded to historical trauma by breaking their mirrors, [Wing Tek] Lum has built something more surgical and compact, like a knife." Ken Chen • NYFA

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"[F]or someone’s poetry to 'be in fashion' means that it’s somehow more about 'keeping up with appearances.'” Don Share • Harriet / Poetry Foundation

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"Stopping everything is something. Stopping everything and stopping all of that thing is something. Stopping everything and then doing nothing in stopping everything is something." Ben Greenman • McSweeney's

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"I like limiting things. I think it describes a certain way of working—a certain way that a lot of people are working today. It gives a name to a lot of different gestures." Kenneth Goldsmith in conversation with Paul Legault • Poets.org

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"Writing with or about metaphors is not dancing with the stars, but dancing with asterisks—pointers to the figurative understructure of our supposedly literal language. The more we stay sensitive to that, the better we dance." Carlin Romano • Chronicle of Higher Education

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"[Timothy] Donnelly thus sets in motion (in slo-mo) a 21st-century purgatory of verbal simulation." Daniel Tiffany • LARB

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"[Y]ou're going to have to try and see clearly through the murk, even for the part you've agreed to take on. An obscure life, without anything dazzling, without any brilliant colors, a terrible difficulty to grasp the real." Pierre Reverdy, trans. Peter Boyle • Jubilat

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"You gotta look beyond, beyond the border to understand the history of your country." CS Giscombe in conversation with Adam Fagin • Eleven Eleven

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"I think I’m actually more naturally a writer of sentences than a writer of poems, whatever that means. I could never have a style that was not made up of complete sentences. I’m resistant to styles that are fragmentary at the level of the sentence. Fragmentary at the level of thought or of stanza I love because that can seem true to the patterns of thought, but fragmentary at the level of the sentence I just can’t read." Dan Chiasson in conversation with Gibson Fay LeBlanc • Guernica

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"'Make it new' is Pound's best-known injunction, not, as it is sometimes taken to be, an exhortation to concentrate on the modern, but instead to rediscover the past so it can speak to the present. 'All ages,' he wrote, 'are contemporaneous.'" Helen Carr • New Statesman

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"Poet’s Guide to Britain (2010), a tie-in for a BBC television series, offered a poetic map of the territory that finds room for first-collection debutantes but none for Geoffrey Hill and Basil Bunting. Where [Paul] Farley and [Michael] Symmons Roberts are concerned, amnesia is the message rather than the medium: the edgelands are delivered to us pre-forgotten, falling outside traditional categories of habitation, attachment and nostalgia." David Wheatley • Tower Poetry

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"The work is phenomenal. If Joyce really did think that Dublin could be reconstructed from Ulysses, Mahon’s New Collected Poems will similarly provide time-capsule proof of late-20th- and early-21st-century transatlantic life." Gerald Dawe on Derek Mahon's New Collected Poems • Irish Times

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"Fisher’s poetry is experimental, but not in the American way." Daisy Fried • Poetry

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"The Arts Council for three years in the 1970s provided free subscriptions for a dozen literary magazines to 600 public libraries: the word was as widely proclaimed as possible. Our library culture was at the heart of a vision of democratic artistic access." Michael Schmidt considers the 200th issue of PN Review • PN Review

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"There is no overarching vision, [Christian] Hawkey’s poem suggests, only those moments when the 'ant-light' briefly clears the glass we look through. And even that’s not right: 'Never through,' we read, 'but around.'” Marjorie Perloff • LARB

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"You can more or less try and repeat the poet’s evocations. But can you render one’s immersion in idiolect and regional intonations? To do so, you have to be sensitive to all the nuances, subtleties and colorings of your own language. And you have to invent the poem you translate anew so that it stands' in your own speech." Jacek Gutorow • Poetry International

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"The insistence on calling the work a novel does achieve the assumption of a multifarious imaginary world that counteracts the lyric I‘s hyperreality; still, one cannot help but think of the book as an entry into Baudelaire’s ambitions for the prose poem: that it be 'musical but without rhythm or rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movement of our consciences.'” Donna Stonecipher • The Quarterly Conversation

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"[T]ranslation acts as a bridge between two different two poetic traditions. What may be permissible in one tradition may be eschewed in another, at least until translation happens. Perhaps it may be better to say that every translation enlarges the possibilities of the target language’s poetic tradition." José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes in conversation with Angela Narciso Torres • Rhino

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"[A] translation (of anything) is good or bad in proportion to the skill with which the translator is able to find equivalents for the significant qualities of the original, and this is exactly as true for the translation of poetry as it is for the translation of an insurance document." DM Black • Poetry London

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"I like the idea of them side by side in the chorus, all desperate for the solo. Maybe the orchestra is made up of their correlative objects then—all the pistillate shivs and frockcoats, imaginary mountains, old socks, stillborns and kidnappees, the Holy Prepuce." JT Welsch in conversation with Michael Egan • Holdfire

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"Lamenting the death of a language and a tradition, the death that had begun in Ireland with the arrival of Spenser and Bryskett, Kinsella had asked himself a difficult and a liberating question, a question that haunts anyone who lives in this landscape now, or writes about it." Colm Toibin on Thomas Kinsella • Irish Times

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"There were rumors that [JH] Prynne held parties in his chambers at Caius where poetry would be debated late into the night and deep existential topics would be broached, like which books of poetry it was acceptable to roll joints on (Pope, no; Keats, yes)." Emily Witt • Poetry / n+1

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"It is a technique [Don] Paterson has refined over the years: a way to deal with a wrenching issue indirectly, thus avoiding putting the case too strongly, while the details of the poem—what Eliot would have called the objective correlative—become metaphors for the terrible matter at the center." Jan Schrieber • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"I do not write memoirs. I do not write novels. I do not write short stories. I do not write plays. I do not write poems. I do not write mysteries. I do not write science fiction. I write fragments. I do not tell stories from things I’ve read or movies I’ve seen, I describe impressions, I make judgments. The modern man I sing." Édouard Levé • Paris Review

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"[John] Ashbery allowed himself to translate these Illuminations the way [Arthur] Rimbaud probably wrote them—on impulse, feeling his way through rather than letting rules dictate style." Katherine Sanders • Words Without Borders

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"One has the sense of [Arthur] Rimbaud stringing together some of his favorite words to create in a breath a sense of rapturous identity. How does one become a genie? By making love to one." Donald Brown • Quarterly Conversation

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"[D]espite a love for teaching his students, their generation is not living up to the radical attitude his own almost took for granted. But nevertheless, there is a feeling of bathos. Of sorts an ode to possibility, The Poetry Lesson unfortunately leaves the reader feeling a little deflated. Entertained, yes, and wiser, for sure. But not exactly inspired." Rupert Thomson • Berlin Review of Books

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"The politics of poetry has partly to do with its character of resistance, its recalcitrance, its awkwardness, understood as a crucial space for reflection and thought on the political realm, on values." Charles Bernstein • Poetry Daily

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"His green world, beautiful but barbaric was enriched by the attention he gave to a more ancient world, the bog, which is not only our timekeeper, but a graph of our consciences." Michael Hartnett reviews Seamus Heaney in 1975 • Irish Times

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"You won't want to leave Rapid City, but if you've learned anything from it, you'll know that you have to." Sean Colletti • Stride

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"[Vasko] Popa thus offers us poetry that does something, that believes in an active language whose intention derives not from an author but from the power of words themselves, simultaneously avowed and disavowed in the impossible exactitude of the curse: ‘God give you a gold coin weighing a ton, so you can’t carry it or spend it, but have to sit beside it begging.’" Sophie Mayer • Modern Poetry in Translation

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"For this crop of British and Irish poets, as their anthology’s title suggests, the first duty of poetry is to reckon with the submerged and potent forces of personal identity. The best poets—and there are many good ones here, beyond [Paul] Batchelor, [Jacob] Polley and [Anthony] Rowland—have the vision to use this as a through-route to social redress and the wider world." Dai George on Identity Parade • Boston Review

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"This, perhaps, is how poetry can be 'useful.'" Siobhan Phillips on Matthew Zapruder • LARB

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"In April 1965 at SUNY [Andrew] Crozier produced a foolscap anthology of Thirteen English Poets, titled SUM, which reflected his clear sense of a dialogue taking place between poets of both countries. If the Grove Press anthology was to make the little islanders aware of what was taking place in America, then Crozier was determined that the innovative poetry, far distant from the acceptable face of Faber & Faber, that was being written in England should be presented to his American hosts." Ian Brinton • PN Review

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"It’s intriguing to see that in resistance to the general drift towards the international—a game of polarities if you like, where one trend is confirmed by the extent to which it provokes its opposite—there is also a flourishing of dialect poetry, texts comprehensible only for a very small community (I cannot understand the poetry of my close colleague Edoardo Zuccato in the Milanese dialect). But such poetry is almost always published with an Italian translation alongside it, suggesting the poet’s desire for intimacy and authenticity on the one hand and an eagerness, perhaps anxiety, to be widely understood on the other. Any eventual translations, of course, will be made from the Italian, not the dialect." Tim Parks • NYRB

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"Name-dropping Beyoncé and Courtney Love, as any teenager knows, does not a cool authority figure make." Rachel Abramowitz on David Orr • Oxonian Review

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"Such a powerful apprehension of change and decay could render a weaker poet conventional, but Shapcott has managed a continual refreshment of her powers of scrutiny, so that mutability is not, as some writers would seem to suggest, a condition towards which we are perpetually heading but one by which we are already occupied." Sean O'Brien • Poetry Review (pdf)

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"[In L.A.] it felt like all the waiters and waitresses were on stage, waiting to be discovered—the smiles were megawatt but skin deep, and attempts at conversation often swayed very swiftly to auditions." Nii Ayikwei Parkes in conversation with David Shook • Molossus

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"Freedom is what [Álvaro de] Campos seeks: ‘No! All I want is freedom!/ Love, glory, money – they’re prisons’, he exclaims in an untitled poem from 1930; and freedom is also what the heteronym bestows on [Fernando] Pessoa himself." Karen McCarthy Woolf • Modern Poetry in Translation

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"Yet though nearly 150 years have intervened since Rimbaud’s first declaration of independence, many readers in our own age, too, still prefer a coherence of imagery, a sameness of tone, a readable sequential message, even, ultimately, what amounts to a prose narrative broken into lines." Lydia Davis • NYT

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"For [Reginald] Shepherd, the history of poetry isn’t a series of erasures. Rather, it is an accretion of styles, many of which persist long after newer styles have risen. As he puts it in the essay 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry,' 'the definitional incoherence at the core of the modern notion of poetry is a sign of its historical evolution.'” Robert Archambeau • Poetry

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"Yeats was educated not by a university but by an early adult mania for anthologising the past. He accumulated anthologies the way a scholar accumulates degrees." Thomas McCarthy on Roy Foster's Yeats • Irish Examiner

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"If the poem were a sit-com, the ghost of James Merrill would have made a cameo as a friendly conductor who chats with the kids and then punches [Daisy] Fried's ticket. Fried is unable to turn to any more-experienced guide for succor. That is a part of her torment, and maybe a diagnosis for our age." Daniel Bosch • Critical Flame

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"Evocation needs more than notation: it needs impetus. You can’t Just Add Hot Water And Serve." Clive James • Poetry

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"What if, on the other hand, Hoagland’s speaker were a clownishly reactionary bigot spewing racial slurs, someone clearly not the poet. How easy it would be to put that character where he belonged: not me. Nothing to do with me." Daisy Fried • Poetry

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"‘A gonomony is any strange object that is difficult to name, that is curiously unlike anything else, and that serves no useful purpose. Gonomonies abound in the houses of glots.’ Words . . . have a sound and a shape, in addition to their meanings. ‘Sometimes the sound is the meaning.’" Iain Bamforth • PN Review

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