On Poetry

Polish Poetry in a Time of American Resistance

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After Donald Trump was elected on November 8, many sought out poetry. “People just were looking for words to help them make sense,” says Jennifer Benka, director of the Academy of American Poets.
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On Poetry

Inside the Ruins: On Derek Walcott’s Life and Work

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Even as a vision of cultural fusion informs the style of his poetry, the soldering of worlds has ethical implications, too. Accounting for the complexities of others’ experiences can remind us of our abiding human bonds, even amidst the blood and muck of the world.
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On Poetry

The Language of Poets: 10 Notable Forms

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Each poetic form is an opportunity. A new house for words.
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On Poetry

Start With These Five New Books of Poetry

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Buy poetry to pause the world, to hide from it, to consider all its hues and microscopic wonders. Buy poetry because poets deserve to get paid.
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On Poetry

Poetry in Motion

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If you should ever come across me on the path and see in my halting stride and grim-faced muttering a defeated man, know that the “viewless wings of Poesy” are transporting me and my aching feet to a better place.
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On Poetry Post-40 Bloomers The Millions Interview

Form Reveals Poems for the Machines They Are: The Millions Interviews Saara Myrene Raappana

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I’m for the usefulness that can be found in what’s broken. I’ll stand for that any day.
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On Poetry

Staring into the Soundless Dark: On the Trouble Lurking in Poets’ Bedrooms

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Vita Sackville-West -- a friend and lover of Virginia Woolf and a poet herself -- combated her insomnia by collecting as many dogs as possible and inviting them into bed with her.
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On Poetry

Big Bad Ted Sings Songs for Little Ones

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Ted Hughes was about the most frightening poet imaginable. His work invests every corner of existence with menace and unmanageable intensity. So it came as a bit of a shock to find out that he was also a marvelous poet for young people.
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On Poetry

An Essential Human Respect: Reading Walt Whitman During Troubled Times

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Rather than succumbing to self-righteous demonization, Whitman illustrated the power of a human empathy that transcends ideological bellicosity.
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On Poetry Reviews

The Intimately Epic Poem We Need: On ‘IRL’ by Tommy Pico

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The digitized, the pop culture, the intimate, the political, and the literary all bleed together, revealing the connective tissue of language that often is as confusing as it is humorous.
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On Poetry

Weaving Images into Verse: Prose for Poets

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Poets should write prose. I say this well aware that suggesting how another should write is akin to telling someone how they should raise their children.
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On Poetry

The Nu-Audacity School of Poetry

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The Nu-Audacity school reserves as sacred that which the academy—or at least those in the ‘professional’ poetry world—disdain or revile.
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On Poetry

The Many Labors of Philip Levine

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To read Philip Levine in this moment is to crack open a road map into the zeitgeist of populist, nativist, and nationalistic sentiments fueling unrest in globalized, post-industrial nations across the world.
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Lists On Poetry

Songs of Ourselves: Searching for America’s Epic Poem

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For all of our tweedy jingoism, the United States seems rare among nations in not having an identifiable and obvious candidate for national epic.
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On Poetry

These Poems Will Never Become a Nostalgic Object

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There is a feeling in this book that a language is coming to the speaker of the poem in the very act of composition -- that is, in real time.
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Lists On Poetry

Enormous Zippers Unfastening: Ten Poems for the End of the World

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Novelists and essayists ponder the apocalypse, but poems are particularly suited toward capturing the anxiety of the end.
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Lists On Poetry

The Whispered Language of Secrets and Fears: Ten Poems for People Who Hate Poetry

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Novels might bore, and short stories can frustrate, but poetry is the only genre of literature that elicits consistent hate.
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On Poetry Reviews

Rival Muses: on Jonathan Bate’s ‘Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life’

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With an archive of blistering personal data at his disposal, but Hughes’s very human survivors more or less at his mercy, Bate faced a crushing ethical dilemma. The work that followed seems perpetually caught between the thrill of scandal and compulsion to soften the blow by selectively presenting Hughes’s most incendiary work as “symbolic.”
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