My first experience with Robert Lowell’s poetry was a failure in reading comprehension. Breezing through a stack of poems I’d been assigned for a college class, I came to his “Man and Wife” and gave it my cursory attention. Its setup is not hard...

Of the many resources I’ve mined in researching James Wright: A Life in Poetry, the most vivid have been recordings of Wright’s readings over the course of two decades, when he was a vital public figure in the world of American poetry. A...

So Where Are We? So where were we? The fiery avalanche headed right at us—falling, flailing bodies in midair— the neighborhood under thick gray powder— on every screen. I don’t know where you are, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I heard a man say; the man who had spoken...

Peter Cole and Christian Wiman, two longtime friends, recently exchanged e-mails about the process of selecting their own work for their latest collections. Wiman’s book of selected poems, Hammer Is the Prayer, published by FSG in 2016, was “a stunning reminder of how...

In trying to sum up the experience of having spent the last ten years editing the poetry of Marianne Moore, most recently in the New Collected Poems, I think of a recent classroom interaction I had. Toward the end of a course on...

Two items from the poet John Ashbery’s private collections appear on the cover for The Songs We Know Best. One is a yellow card from the early 1940s that his father, Chester "Chet" Ashbery, designed to advertise goods sold by the Ashbery...

The madness of March is past, and true to form—here in New York, at least—“lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches.” What does that mean? It’s National Poetry Month! Starting today, we will regularly post new pieces related to all things poetry. Expect...

THREE POEMS is the brainchild of Max Freeman, a Brooklyn-based poet and filmmaker. Inspired by a film of Frank O’Hara reading “Having a Coke with You,” Max invites poets over to his studio to read three poems. For Poetry Month we matched...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

I love the sense of buffeting by wind, birds, trees and some enigmatic power that leaves me feeling energized in ways that cannot be named. —Sheryl Cotleur Three Ways of Looking at God 1. A claustrophobia of sand and stone: a walled heat. The light bleaches and curves like...

Nothing was ever more astute than William Carlos Williams’s “A poem is a machine made of words.” (If it sounds cold or technocratic, think of the machine as a music box or a bicycle.) Schuyler’s little machine is more intricate than it looks. When...

Marianne Moore’s masterpiece “The Fish” is that rare poem that enters the mind through the front door and the back door at the same time. There’s not another poem that has its cake and eats it too like “The Fish” does. It luxuriates in...

Often considered one of James Wright’s most optimistic poems, “Two Hangovers” is appropriately two-minded and torn. Asking for a silence it doesn’t entirely want, it finds a joy it didn’t expect. —Brad Johnson Two Hangovers Number One I slouch in bed. Beyond the streaked trees of my window, All groves...

I first read Hamlet in Jamaica. The bleak daylight surrounding my high school Happy Grove was like the faded glow of an old photograph. Rain was expected; it never came. There might’ve been thunder, or that could just have been the pages turning in...

Like Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Christopher Logue’s “account” of the Iliad is an imagist epic. It is surely less various and original than its modernist precursors, but it can’t be matched for sheer pleasure. With plot and character given, Logue attends to local intensities and...

Rarely is our first encounter with a poem an aural one. I was introduced to C. K. Williams’s "Invisible Mending" twelve years ago when the poet read it aloud at a memorial service for one of his oldest friends, the artist Sam Maitin. His...

Paul Celan's language never tires. It is constantly propelling us through the webs of images in his poems. Celan uses language to break the conventional barriers of language itself. —Laura Buccieri span.small { font-variant: small-caps; } Sackcloth-mold, tower-high. Eye slot for...

Dream Song 29 is not an obviously optimistic poem. How could it be, when it begins, "There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart / só heavy"—and immediately, any reader whose heart has ever been burdened, brought low (and it is hard to...

At his best, Wang An-Shih has a way of taking small moments and projecting them out into the infinite. Consciousness tangles into itself, the human blends with the natural. “Following Thoughts” invokes an exciting kind of interobjectivity. Hinton is my favorite translator of Chinese...

Maureen N. McLane’s poem “Haunt” does just that. Or perhaps more accurately, it is itself haunted, by the two versions of the anonymous Child Ballad No. 26 (“The Three Ravens” / “The Twa Corbies”) that the author acknowledges as reference points in her notes....