Cover Story

Rudy Can’t Fail
"Where the photographs insist on a tension between figure and ground, an excited, impassive inside-joke feeling, the films dissipate that tension, amassing beautiful and silly details en route to the sublime." Jordan Davis discusses the poetics of Rudy Burckhardt's photography and film.

On Poets

Photo Finnish

"Parland seems to be scribbling on napkins that scatter to the winds as he devotes himself to the truly urgent project˜simply living." Jana Prikryl traces Henry Parland's path from bullied schoolboy to literary prodigy to forgotten avant-garde poet.

“Every Tool Became a Weapon”

Tod Marshall talks Yusef Komunyakaa to about his forthcoming book, Warhorses. The poet discusses the mishandling of the watery fire of Hurricane Katrina, America's silence on race and class, how self-hatred can lead to brutality, and the poet's role in documenting the history of violence and war.

On Poetry

Verse by the Yard

While long, collaborative poems have been written for generations, the coming of the Internet has allowed more people than ever to take part. With human authors now joined by spam robots, the title of the world's longest poem is up for grabs. Izzy Ginspan investigates.

Structure Is Structure

"It took me years to realize how studying musical structures—which I did in very good music theory classes in high school—must have laid down matrices in my brain that later influenced the forms of my writing." Lydia Davis talks to Jason McBride about her translation technique.

Audio

:



:



:



:

Reading Guides

Apply WD-40

Donald Revell's "The Northeast Corridor" stands as one of his last poems in what can be considered his early style. Revell was ready to move on, and you can hear it. Stephen Burt reads into this exhausted poem.

How To Read A Poem (and Fall in Love With Poetry)

Curious about poetry, but don't know where or how to begin? We've republished a how to guide by the respected poet Edward Hirsch. Its seventeen sections step you through the elements of poetry. Each section has plenty of links to example of poems in our archive to illustrate Hirsch's points.