We are all going into a world of dark. And that’s okay, Given the wing-wrung alternative. It’s okay. That’s where the secrets are, The big ones, the ones too tall to tell. The way in is twisty and torturous, but easy, they say, easy. The way out, however, is unavailable, and...

A new volcano has erupted, the papers say, and last week I was reading where some ship saw an island being born: at first a breath of steam, ten miles away; and then a black fleck—basalt, probably— rose in the mate’s binoculars and caught on the horizon like a fly. They named it. But my poor old island’s still un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it right.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through...

This October marks John Berryman’s centenary, and to honor the hundredth anniversary of this inventive, transformative poet’s birth, we’re republishing a number of his works. In addition to The Heart is Strange, a new volume of selected poems edited by Daniel Swift, we’re also reissuing Berryman's Sonnets, 77 Dream Songs, and the complete Dream Songs. Here, John Darnielle—Mountain Goats frontman, avowed Berryman fanatic, and author of the novel Wolf in White Van, also coming from FSG this fall—takes us beyond the Dream Songs and into the pleasures of "Tampa Stomp" (which is included in The Heart is Strange). - Editors

I think of you here because I thought of you here before. Otherwise I never think of you except on a summer drive that echoes the drive I took the day after I heard you died except when I see the red skirt I wore that day the day you finally kissed me a red skirt I now...

There is a hornet in the room and one of us will have to go out the window into the late August midafternoon sun. I won. There is a certain challenge in being humane to hornets but not much. A launch draws two lines of wake behind it on the bay like...

My day job, so to speak, is to teach literature, most often the literature of the British romantic period (@1750-1830). I tend to focus on poetry and poetics, and over the years people have asked what this might have to do with my own poetry. (The very notion of “my own poetry” is one I’d like to put some pressure on . . .) One’s hand is dyed in the substance in which one immerses; it’s hard to undye the hand or unweave the fabric of thought in one’s poems, but yes there are loops of affinity, language, and thought there, resonances and overtones in my work that it isn’t wrong to call romantic.

Debatable Land   The palest green immerings on the slopes the snow’d made white near overspread the snowdrops ungeared for fighting yet strive they do to live in this suddenly coldened place.

This poem, from my second book, Accepting the Disaster, is based on my impressions of a real cement plant in Ravena, New York. My sense of the place developed gradually over the 35 years my father worked there as a welder, and more startlingly during the 9 weeks in 1988 when I worked there on a labor crew.

In 1967, the poet John Berryman—already a Pulitzer Prize winner for his 77 Dream Songs—was interviewed by the English critic A. Alvarez. The interview, which ran over the course of three days, was filmed for the BBC at a pub, Ryan’s Beggars Bush, in Ballsbridge, Dublin, and it is from this footage that the clips of Berryman reading his Dream Songs—#14 and #29—which now circulate on YouTube are drawn.

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. “A dream recounted is a reader...

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. I often think of my favorite...

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. “Berryman,” by W.S. Merwin, is originally...

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. The incandescent temperament of Berryman's poetry...

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work.

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work.

In commemoration of the centenary of John Berryman's birth (October 25, 1914), FSG’s Work in Progress is celebrating this icon of twentieth-century American literature by having authors write about what they admire about him and his work. This is an unpublished letter, dated...

In celebration of the centenary of James Laughlin’s birth (October 30, 1914), Jonathan Galassi recalls his time at Meadow House in Norfolk, CT with the publisher and founder of New Directions. This essay originally appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 23, No. 1/2. Next month, FSG will publish “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, by Ian S. MacNiven. My picture of J. Laughlin is indivisible from the place where he lived, a small town in northwestern Connecticut where even today nature remains dominant. Waves of hills cut by headlong brooks, second-growth forest of tall white pine, birch and hardwood cut by old logging roads, glacial boulders in the fields—and strong weather, especially long, cold, snowy winters: reputedly the highest point in the state, Norfolk is known as the Ice Box of Connecticut.

Born on October 30, 1914, James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions, wrote more than 1250 poems in his lifetime. In celebration of the centenary of his birth, the following is excerpted from The...