PoetryFoundation.org: On Poets

A Poet and his Robots

Is there a connection between someone's poems and their obsessions? Richard Siken interviews Albert Goldbarth about his collection of vintage space toys. The first in an occasional series.

“Deeply and Mysteriously Implicated”

In 1949 Robert Lowell, fresh from his Pulitzer win, brought a firestorm of attention (and the FBI) to the quiet writing colony of Yaddo when he accused a fellow resident of Communist sympathies. Carla Blumenkranz takes a look back.

She’s Still Mad

Anne Winters and Eleanor Lerman are the past two winners of the Lenore Marshall Poetry prize. Coincidentally, they are also middle aged women who didn't publish for many years. Claire Dederer takes a look at this pair of politically charged poets, who, even in middle age, are as angry as ever.

Inside Game

John Updike’s poem “Ex-Basketball Player” is more popular on our site than Shakespeare. It started soaring last March during the NCAA finals, but since then, has remained in our top ten most popular poems, having been displayed more than 10,000 times. Why? Is there some social network of nostalgic middle-aged men looking back at their star-studded high-school years? We turned to John Updike for answers.

Robert Hass Blew My Mind

Lately we've noticed that poets and readers from different generations and aesthetic schools admire and mention Robert Hass in their essays, conversations, and poems. Why does his poetry have such broad appeal? We asked five poets to pick a favorite Hass poem and explain why.

Gwendolyn Brooks 101

The October issue of Poetry magazine features Danielle Chapman’s extended consideration of the poems and life of Gwendolyn Brooks. PoetryFoundation.org asked Chapman to select five Brooks poems from our online archive and to write a few lines on each.

Directed by Desire

Adrienne Rich writes, June Jordan “believed in and lived the urgency of the word.” The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Jordan became the most widely published African-American poet and essayist of her time. Alongside Adrienne Rich’s introduction to Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, we’ve gathered a selection of of work by and about her, including an excerpt from her autobiography Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, and two audio documentaries highlighting her life and career.

Avoid the Personal Like the Plague

“It’s terrible to have our writers thrown back on private subjects while the public language gets farther and farther from the truth of what is happening,” says poet Eleanor Wilner. A profile by Rachel Aviv.

Kitchen Ants and Everyday Epiphanies

While she believes the poet doesn’t exist outside of her writing, Jane Hirshfield manages to get around. From a friendship with Czeslaw Milosz to living in a Zen Monastery Cynthia Haven writes about the circumstances that have shaped Hirshfield’s work.

Featured Poet

Scott Cairns (1954–) is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (2002). Many of his poems come from a Christian perspective; Cairns investigates the relationship between poetry and expressions of faith, finding in both a sense of mystery and immediacy. He teaches at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Morbid Poetry Will Never Die

Though we didn’t intend so many of our pop culture articles to address death and suicide, we should hardly be surprised: thanks to Plath, Sexton, and others, the poet-as-suicide is a permanent fixture of our popular imagination. From grunge icon Kurt Cobain’s journals to Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series to Lindsay Lohan’s turn as a brooding teenage poet, poetry collides with popular culture in ways morbid and mesmerizing. Poets and readers looking for inner peace instead might follow Leonard Cohen’s lead—all the way up to a Zen Center in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Desire to Burn
On a devastating page of his journals, Kurt Cobain wrote down a poem by Alicia Ostriker entitled “A Young Woman, a Tree.” Tim Appelo analyzes the poem and wishes Cobain had read it differently.

A Pair of Andys
Unlikely kindred spirits, Andy Warhol and Andrew Marvell were separated by a medium and 300 years. But both were great connoisseurs of the garish and disturbing. Robert Polito takes a close look at Warhol’s paintings and Marvell’s poems, and on the way gives us a glimpse of the literary scene in 1960s Cambridge.

Altman, Keillor, and the Suicide Poet Girl
As she watched Lindsay Lohan play a mopey teenage poet in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, Ange Mlinko hoped the girl would counteract the movie’s middle-aged, Middle-Western whimsy. Does Hollywood get in the way?

Man of the Moment
With a new book of poems, a documentary, and a tribute concert, this seems like it’s Leonard Cohen’s year. After decades of jokes about producing music suited only to suicide, things are looking up for the original Buddhist ladies’ man. RJ Smith checks in on Cohen’s famously light touch.

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