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  • 04.28.23
    Q&A with Jeff Clark
    Poetry

    Q&A with Jeff Clark

    As part of our ongoing celebration of National Poetry Month we spoke with poet, designer, and longtime FSG collaborator Jeff Clark about his creative process, the ins and outs of creating distinctive and powerful book covers, and some of his many and varied influences....

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  • 04.01.22
    Richard Howard
    Poetry
    Richard Howard

    Richard Howard

    Richard Howard, author of Inner Voices and Paper Trail and acclaimed translator, died this week in Manhattan. He was 92. In honor of his memory, we would like to share "Like Most Revelations" from his collection Inner Voices: Selected Poems 1963-2003. “Like Most Revelations” It is the...

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  • 03.03.22
    Russia Comes Into Poland
    Poetry
    Zagajewski

    Russia Comes Into Poland

    Through the meadow and hedgerow, village and forest, cavalries on the march, infantries on the march, horses and cannons, old soldiers, young soldiers, children, wiry wolfhounds at full gallop, a blizzard of feathers, sleds, Black Marias, carriages, taxis, even the old cars called Moskwitch come roaring in, and warships and...

    Adam Zagajewski

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  • 04.30.21
    Under and Over
    Poetry

    Under and Over

    Often I wake in the night, or the cat wakes me, and since I have been trying to break the habit of  reaching for my phone—that express route to “the portal” (per Patricia Lockwood)—what do I do? Sometimes a yoga-inspired (and undoubtedly inauthentic) body...

    Maureen N. McLane

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  • 11.22.19
    Writing Sensory Experience
    Poetry

    Writing Sensory Experience

    If a rolling stone gathers no moss, the poems in Devin Johnston’s Mosses and Lichens attend to what accretes over time, as well as to what erodes. They often take place in the middle of life’s journey, at the edge of the woods,...

    Devin Johnston & Robyn Creswell In Conversation

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  • 08.23.19
    100 Poems
    Poetry

    100 Poems

    The idea for this collection of one hundred poems is not a new one. My father himself had contemplated such a book, particularly in later years, and had gone as far as discussing it with his editor and close confidants. The notion of a...

    Seamus Heaney

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  • 07.16.19
    A Poetry Reading List
    Poetry

    A Poetry Reading List

    FSG’s poetry list for 2019 celebrates voices old and new, from Seamus Heaney to Katie Peterson. These are poems that interrogate today’s politics and anger—that reinvigorate and offer clarity, singing “the music of what happens.” Published A Piece of Good News by Katie...

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  • 04.26.19
    The Antiguans
    Poetry

    The Antiguans

    As diverse as our stories may be poets are nevertheless in the process of creating a single art, some trace of what we were able to accomplish with our language before we inevitably canceled each other out. Eventually, through lurking, inescapable age, or cataclysm,...

    Rowan Ricardo Phillips A Personal Essay on Impersonal Poetry

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  • 04.18.19
    Bivalves
    Poetry

    Bivalves

    Some years ago, a friend wrote to me admiring what he called at the time my “bivalve poems.” I thought he meant how a lot of the poems in my new book consisted of two stanzas of equal length, and that was partly true....

    Carl Phillips

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  • 04.18.19
    Seeds in the Soil
    Poetry

    Seeds in the Soil

    Find an example of wood with your eyes. The floorboards, a door, trim around the window, cutting board, kitchen table, the sycamore there. Imagine it against your knuckles as you rap on it. Feel how hard. Hear the knock. Now, add time. Not that...

    Nina MacLaughlin On the Poetry of Ovid, Auden, Adrienne Rich, and Octavio Paz

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  • 04.12.19
    Poetry and Philosophy Revisited
    Poetry

    Poetry and Philosophy Revisited

    As an academic philosopher and the author of many books of poetry, I’m often asked about the relationship between poetry and philosophy. What I’ve usually said in the past is something along these lines: Philosophy and poetry can both be ways of responding to...

    John Koethe

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  • 04.12.19
    Fiddle Music
    Poetry

    Fiddle Music

    For as long as I can remember, I have composed poems from the bits of language revolving in my head when no more pressing thoughts intrude. While out for a walk or running an errand, a phrase or stanza might start up and repeat...

    Devin Johnston

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  • 04.04.19
    Writing to a Single Listener
    Poetry

    Writing to a Single Listener

    In those days I began to see light under every bushel basket, light nearly splitting the sides of the bushel basket. Light came through the rafters of the dairy where the grackles congregated like well-taxed citizens untransfigured even by hope. Understand I was the one underneath the basket. I was...

    Katie Peterson and Louise Glück In Conversation

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  • 04.04.19
    FSG Poetry Month 2019
    Poetry

    FSG Poetry Month 2019

    “Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.” —Marianne Moore The best time of year is here again—happy National Poetry Month! Celebrate all month with exclusive Work in Progress features, from essays to conversations to poetry excerpts, honoring the inspiring poets who...

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  • 12.21.18
    The Poems of T. S. Eliot
    Poetry

    The Poems of T. S. Eliot

    Poet, essayist, playwright, and social critic T. S. Eliot was one of the defining voices of the 20th century and an integral part of the Modernist movement. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."...

    T. S. Eliot Practical Cats and Further Verses

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  • 07.13.18
    Poetry and Simplicity
    Poetry

    Poetry and Simplicity

    Pablo Neruda wrote a total of 225 odes. The number stands as a pledge of alliance with a lyrical form he adored. He was also fond of other poetic forms (the sonnet, for instance), but as a practitioner of verso libre, unrhymed poetry, the...

    The Odes of Pablo Neruda

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  • 06.06.18
    Sleepwalking Ballad
    Poetry
    Sleepwalking Ballad

    Sleepwalking Ballad

    June 5th was the 120th anniversary of renowned Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca’s birth. Lorca was born in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a few miles outside Granada in the region of Andalusia in southern Spain. From an early age he was fascinated...

    Federico García Lorca

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  • 04.27.18
    The Poet Who Taught the Serious Girl to Cut the Sun
    Poetry

    The Poet Who Taught the Serious Girl to Cut the Sun

    I am thirteen. My mom and I are walking down a hallway in the wing of a San Francisco art museum and pass an auditorium. I can hear a voice on the other side of the door, loud, accented, lilting and rolling and sure...

    Tessa Fontaine On Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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  • 04.27.18
    Memory Palaces
    Poetry

    Memory Palaces

    The first poem I remember—really, it is the first poem I remember remembering—began: In a dark park a tree barked And a crocus croaked I watched my watch… At least, I think that was it, but I lost the book years ago, and I don’t know who wrote...

    Daniel Swift On Nursery Rhymes

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  • 04.20.18
    “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”
    Poetry
    Autumn's Ferry

    “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”

    “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of the Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed...

    August Kleinzahler On the Poetry of James Wright

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