What Do You Know? April 13, 2009: Judith Shklar introduced her book Ordinary Vices by saying, "It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day." I suppose poets these days aren't supposed to put their minds to grand tasks - you know, it's more like write a poem every day [...] by Don Share

Happy Birthday!!! March 25, 2009: Some folks didn't care for our recent commemoration of the centennial of Futurism - like we were endorsing it somehow, sheesh! Well, it's time to celebrate yet another birthday. (more...) by Don Share

So Little Depends upon a Little Red Rooster! March 18, 2009: Image courtesy of Muhammad Mahdi Karim, www.micro2macro.net Should poets write poems that describe things (like, say, this silly-looking rooster) ... or not? (more...) by Don Share

Translation and its discontents, part quatre February 27, 2009: "When I was reading an anthology of contemporary European poetry, I was struck by how much its poems tended to sound alike: in most cases, I couldn’t really tell what country or language a poetry had come from until I checked." (more...) by Don Share

I’ve decided to draw poems… February 2, 2009: Jason Guriel recently took a keen-eyed look at the visual poetry we presented in the November 2008 issue of Poetry. One of our readers, Jerry Payne, in Clearwater, Florida, wrote in to say: "Look, let’s call “visual poetry” what it really is—visual art. Some of us are in love with language and the way in which words—just words—can be [...] by Don Share

The things people write in books! January 7, 2009: I mean literally, the things people scrawl on the flyleaves and in the margins of books. My mother taught me not to deface books, not even to dog-ear them, but tell it to a poet! There's real treasure in literary marginalia: notes, scribbles, and assorted editorial comments added to books. Take Blake's famous comment on Francis Bacon - [...] by Don Share

The fist of survival: On childhood and poetry December 5, 2008: I wanted to leave everywhere from about the age of nine. This involved delinquency at school and withdrawal from the home scene. I didn’t like grown-ups with the exception of my father and felt uncomfortable with what was given to me as a birthright and what later came to be understood (by me and my culture) as meaning: White. (more...) by Don Share

Information, Thy Nemesis is Reverie November 25, 2008: Quoth Ange Mlinko - Just three years ago I was sitting in a room of a Madison Avenue office tower, listening to my boss make a pitch to his boss, a hedge fund manager. Normally, during my spotty career as "content specialist" in various capacities, meetings were an opportunity to get hopped up on coffee and doodle. This was not to happen in front [...] by Don Share

Deciphering the “mi’kmaq book of the dead” November 11, 2008: Although it's not essential to this visual poem or an appreciation of it, mIEKAL aND has produced a translation of what you see above; it begins like this... (more...) by Don Share

Editing yourself out… and in. November 10, 2008: We open on a tiny flat in Dublin. A young poet sits by a window, writing. But something is wrong. The poem—eloquent, sonorous, carefully crafted—feels off. Studying the page, she suddenly realizes why, and the reason hurts harder for having been so easy to miss: she edited herself out. (more...) by Don Share