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 think of poetry as what Wallace Stevens called a soliloquy of the interior paramour, or less grandly, as a form of talking to yourself, rather than addressing an audience. But I have the sense that when people first hear this description of poetry,...

It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to poet C. K. Williams who died at his home last Sunday. In twenty-two books of poetry, Williams graced us with his revelatory honesty, his passionate inquiries, and his unflinching morality. His body of work...

In late April, Cynthia Haven posted a review of Ellendea Proffer Teasley’s new memoir Brodsky Among Us on her Stanford University Book Haven Blog. One person, however, took exception to her criticism of Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky’s translation of his own works...

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...

From the impressive FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, it would have been easy to choose one of Jorge Luis Borges’s masterpieces without making a mistake. Particularly the one titled “Borges and I,” which interestingly has always been read either as a...

In this poem, from Federico Garcia Lorca’s wonderful, evocative book, Poet in New York, the shifting connotations of words—horse, dog, swallow, bee—lead us through the stages of artistic creation, from painful physical desire to the bittersweet perception of beauty (the rose), to the...

When I first saw James Fenton read onstage, I found myself, midway through this poem, staring at his head with my jaw set and my mouth moronically ajar. I didn’t have a mirror, but if I try to imagine my face, I think of...

This poem fills my mouth with everything I crave—beauty, bread, and stillness. —Nora Barlow I eat this silence like bread. The white lake replaces my head I am cold & calm as the untracked snows.         Maureen N. McLane is the author of three collections...

When I was a kid, my family used to go on summer vacations to Jamaica. The only things left from those trips are sensory memories, but when I read this poem, I imagine myself sitting with my parents and brother at another table at...

I came across Neruda’s poem long before I had any cause to know the suffering of lost love or the secrets a night can hold. And yet it spoke to me, made me feel tenderness, perhaps because longing actually precedes loss. As a grown...

Of all the poets I’ve been reading lately, no one’s work sticks so tenaciously to my craw as that of Carol Ann Duffy. Or was that in my craw? Sound gets lip-service but needs prophets; her poems are liturgy to that end. Image and...

Pablo Neruda found me in a strange way. I was still a teenager, obsessed with the Beats and pouring over Whitman in English class. I enjoyed writing poetry, but did not yet take it seriously. I was standing in the poetry section of the...

The poet Ali Ahmed Said, better known by his pen name, Adonis, was born in a mountain village of a few hundred people in Northwestern Syria in 1930. His father was a farmer, and his mother, who died in 2013 at the age of...

I’ve always liked this poem, and as I’m turning forty this month, lately I’ve found myself thinking about it a lot. Born in Leningrad, as it was then known, Joseph Brodsky had a hard life, in part because of his poetry; he was sentenced...