Who could resist this invitation to eavesdrop on the fabulous? The title for Ange Mlinko’s most recent book, Marvelous Things Overheard, is taken from a collection of anecdotes and wonders, falsely attributed to Aristotle, which explain, in tight descriptive units, marvels of the...

In Cuba, poetry is in the air one breathes. It is in the music, in the humor, in the political debates, in the desire to be fully in the present and in the recognition that history is implacable. There is a poetry within, written...

Politics is "a glove-puppet" of images twisting emotion twisting reason. What wordplay, what music, what cargo! Duffy reminds us of the grave degradation of our political landscape. How can it be fixed? Dare we say POLITICS? —Erin Goss Politics How it makes your face a stone that aches...

William James set the stage for his essays in Pragmatism by dividing philosophical temperaments into two sorts: the tender-minded and the tough-minded. Aleksandr Kushner’s poems decidedly fall into the tough-minded side, and yet are also loved in Russia for their tenderness and delicacy of...

“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...

As a longtime reader of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, I was delighted to discover, in researching my biography of the poet and publisher James Laughlin, that he had first turned to her, in 1935, on the urging of Marianne Moore. Laughlin was hooked, and he...

James's “Jerusalem” seems especially poignant to me now, more than twenty-five years since it was first published in the London Times. Alas, what he says is still true; it's still what is going on, and maybe more so. —Darryl Pinckney Jerusalem I     Stone cries to stone,     Heart to heart,...

“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...

A boy overhears a horrifying act of brutality, and hears too an agonized question—“Who are you?”—to which the poem is a kind of answer. In the midst of suffering and terror, he puts his lips to a source, and violence occasions an awakening to...

Although it is safe to say that my sleepless Brooklyn nights are nothing like Lorca's might have been, I think I might know an inch of the feeling of that boy, “buried this morning [...] who cries because he doesn't know bridges exist” (“que...

“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...

My answer is very simple, fast and speedy—C. K. Williams, "The Singing." The best poem I ever read. It truly always zooms through my mind, and I see him—Big. —Patrice Nganang The Singing I was walking home down a hill near our house on a balmy afternoon        under the...

Few poets are as capable as Ted Hughes at capturing the elemental, rending power of nature. “Wind,” which stubbornly refuses to acquiesce to soft pastoral breezes, shakes me with the force it contains, a force that threatens at the middle of the poem to...

I still don’t feel old enough to read Berryman, and I first read him twenty years ago, when I was about fifteen. No one else uses English so baroquely or so tenderly; or moves through tones as quickly or as terribly. No one else...

Given that Houston is my hometown, it pains me to say that it’s not a city—like Rome, Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, New York, Paris—given to poetry. “Houston, 6 P.M.” is a great and sly exception. That it starts with enchantment and disenchantment—“Europe already sleeps beneath...

“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 this way this poem unfolds, beginning with the evocative opening line that pulls you into the vivid landscape Phillips has not just created, but conjured. His subtle music, gorgeous phrasing, and remarkable insights become wonderfully complex in the span of a few...

The heralds are sounding their horns: It's National Poetry Month. For the next thirty days we will have poems for you in all shapes and sizes, credos and conceits. And this year, we'll have them for both your eyes and ears. Each day, a...

Seamus Heaney's translation of Book VI of the Aeneid follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the significance of the poem to his writing, noting that...

I often rely on my friend Max Freeman—a filmmaker, photographer, and exceptionally fine poet himself—to steer me toward poems and poets worth savoring. Last time we met, he pressed me to read Patrizia Cavalli and to start with her “effortless masterpiece” Pigre divinità e...