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The Cranberry Cantos by The Editors

Fri, 20 November 2009 11:36:46 GMT

A list of Thanksgiving poems for family and friends.

Mina Loy: “Lunar Baedeker” by Jessica Burstein

Wed, 18 November 2009 14:54:10 GMT

Mina Loy is not Myrna Loy. While the actress Myrna Loy starred in the “The Thin Man” films, the Modernist poet Mina Loy was busying herself with the avant gardes of Italian Futurism, Dada, and to a lesser extent American Surrealism. The confusion is recurrent. Yes, their names are similar and yes, they were contemporaries, but the mix-up makes an even deeper sense given the two Loys' shared elegance, and the Platonic rightness of imagining the poet ordering and lining up a sequence of martinis while in the company of William Powell.

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Washington, DC, Poetry Tour by The Editors

Wed, 18 November 2009 14:53:18 GMT

The Washington, DC, Poetry Tour reveals our nation’s capital through the eyes of its great poets, including Archibald MacLeish, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Elizabeth Bishop, among many others. From the hallowed halls of the federal buildings to neighborhood side streets, the tour features poems written in and about DC, as well as photographs by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis.

Narrated by inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander and produced by the Poetry Foundation, the tour showcases archival and contemporary recordings of DC poets, scholars, and musicians, all shedding new light on DC’s historic landmarks.

Poetry lovers in the city can download the audio tours and maps to explore the National Mall and Northwest DC, or take a walking tour beginning at the Library of Congress and ending in Dupont Circle.

Take the tour!

Absolute Necessities by Jeff Gordinier

Wed, 18 November 2009 09:24:08 GMT

“See, I can’t seem to stop myself. The other day I left Baby Grand Books in Warwick, New York, with John Keats. Last spring, somewhere between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, I stumbled into a boxcar-shaped used-book outpost next to a taco stand and ended up riding northward with Tom Clark and Nikki Giovanni in the backseat of my rental car. In Manhattan I pass through Grand Central Terminal nearly every weekday; there, I have been known to drift into Posman Books and drift out three minutes later, dashing toward track 42 with Marie Ponsot or Leonard Cohen or Robin Robertson or Ada Limón under my arm. There are times when my purchases are random; there are times when they’re linked to some curious mental impulse—even pity.”—Jeff Gordinier explains his compulsion to purchase poetry.

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Anne Bradstreet: “To My Dear and Loving Husband” by Emily Warn

Wed, 11 November 2009 12:51:35 GMT

Why was Anne Hutchinson punished for being outspoken about religion and politics, while Bradstreet became a cultural icon? One answer can be found in her poem “To my Dear and Loving Husband.” From our contemporary perspective, it reads like a traditional Elizabethan love sonnet (composed of 12 lines instead of 14). Compared to Bradstreet’s earlier discourses on science, religion, and politics, it is written in a relatively plain style and unabashedly declares her abiding love for her husband.—Emily Warn examines Anne Bradstreet's “To my Dear and Loving Husband.”

Poetry and Project Runway by Stephen Burt

Wed, 11 November 2009 10:13:00 GMT

Many poets, like many designers, love technical challenges; some poets have organized books (Robyn Schiff's baroque Worth, Angie Estes's nimble Chez Nous) around haute couture. No wonder, then, that Project Runway counts poets among its fans.—Stephen Burt finds a connectiton between poetry and Project Runway.

James Schuyler in the Spotlight by Eric Ziegenhagen

Mon, 2 November 2009 12:41:42 GMT

“That feeling—the story happening as it’s being told—times ten, times a hundred, is what first struck me about James Schuyler’s poems: a specific time, place, room, garden, season, all happening in the present with the kind of balance, detail, and occasion more typical of a painting than a diary. That’s how Schuyler’s poems work for me, what gives them their own charge”—Eric Ziegenhagen reflects on James Schuyler.

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Philip Larkin: “An Arundel Tomb” by Jeremy Axelrod

Thu, 29 October 2009 11:55:19 GMT

The last line of “An Arundel Tomb” is among the most quoted in all of Larkin: “What will survive of us is love.” Its popularity can seem ironic. Larkin is mainly known for the dry eloquence of his gloom, and for the sly precision of his phrasing. A line so keen on love looks odd, even mawkish, coming from Larkin, for whom starry-eyed imagery, as he wrote in “Sad Steps,” was “High and preposterous and separate.” Yet “An Arundel Tomb” is not a sentimental poem; it is about what sentimentality looks like the morning after. — Jeremy Axelrod explores Philip Larkin's “An Arundel Tomb.”

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The Poetry of Autumn by Annie Finch

Wed, 28 October 2009 12:19:38 GMT

“The poetry of earth is never dead,” wrote John Keats, and yet that quintessential poet of autumn, his own life fading as the colors of his glory blazed and flew, was exquisitely alive to the season’s dying. His sleeping Autumn, cheeks flushed and hair awry, personifies the sensual richness of the early part of the season as iconically as the yellow leaves of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 embody the forlorn grandeur of the late. And yet both of these poems contain the tinge of their opposites, more exquisite for being so subtle: the unspoken sexual passion in the sonnet, and the hint of the ominous in the ode (the wailing of the bugs, the swallows gathering) are so delicate they are barely there.

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You've Come a Long Way, Baby by Eileen Myles, CA Conrad

Wed, 21 October 2009 12:59:50 GMT

“CA Conrad came over to my apartment in Manhattan’s East Village one afternoon in April. I’d admired his poems for years, having met him on another afternoon in New York when he sought me out of enthusiasm for my work. Conrad always seeks out his favorite writers. It seemed a very traditional and direct method of establishing lineage.”—Eileen Myles interviews CA Conrad

Ten Poems I Love to Teach by Eric Selinger

Wed, 14 October 2009 13:47:20 GMT

“Some poems you love, and some you love to teach. What’s the difference? The teachable ones do half the work for you: the questions they raise and the pleasures they offer show that close reading is not, despite its chilly reputation, academia’s way of 'beating it [the poem] with a hose / to find out what it really means' (Billy Collins, 'Introduction to Poetry'). Quite the contrary: close reading is courtship, a passionate, delicate way to find out what makes this particular poem worth a second date (that is, writing a paper about) or maybe worth spending the rest of your life with (that is, memorizing).”—Eric Selinger lists the poems he loves to teach.

Twice-Told Tales by Tess Taylor

Wed, 30 September 2009 13:32:27 GMT

Two recent poets build such new rooms as they create large-scale works around two canonic 19th-century tales. In A Monster’s Notes, a sprawling, fragmented 500-page tome, poet Laurie Sheck reimagines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary expands and enlarges Moby-Dick.

—Tess Taylor on Laurie Sheck and Dan Beachy-Quick.

Lives of the Poets: Laura Jensen by Heidi Broadhead

Wed, 23 September 2009 11:59:59 GMT

When I first contacted Jensen about spending a day in Tacoma with her, she replied by e-mail: “Some good sense tells me the work I did in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s has transitioned into more. In those years I felt I was applying a lot of energy, and my way is different now.”—Heidi Broadhead spends some time with Laura Jensen

Nicholson Baker Talks Poetry by Jesse Nathan

Wed, 16 September 2009 11:49:52 GMT

Baker’s book is three parts narrative and one part manifesto. But as Chowder searches for a few precious words on a topic dear to him, as he digresses for us into daydreams about his favorite poets, as he expounds on the need for the production of many bad poems in order to generate that one gem, the novel that takes form feels organic, more like a conversation than a poetics lesson.—Jesse Nathan interviews Nicholson Baker

In Search of the Auden Martini by Rosie Schaap

Wed, 9 September 2009 12:08:28 GMT

So strong is W.H. Auden's association with the martini that his home city of York, England marked the 2007 centenary of his birth with tributes not only in words but also in booze. York's newspaper, the Press, reported in advance of the event: “On the stroke of 6pm, the assembled guests will all enjoy a Martini—as Auden himself used to do at that time every day.”—Rosie Schaap on a search for the Auden Martini.

Lives of the Poets: Rodrigo Toscano by Jason Boog

Wed, 19 August 2009 11:18:03 GMT

"Toscano, as a labor activist and as a poet is a highly combustible presence. He’s a radical in an older tradition—restless and fiery, much more Louis Zukofsky than Allen Ginsberg—but he shows up for work every day, too, which makes him something else altogether." Jason Boog profiles Rodrigo Toscano

Keats in Space by Molly Young

Wed, 12 August 2009 10:54:42 GMT

Creative frenzy is one of those subjects that makes for perennially joyful reading, no matter what field or object it takes as its center. Our idea of the single-minded pursuit—feverish, purposeful, overwhelming—is a distinctly Romantic one, and it springs from the poets of the era: Byron, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley. Molly Young discusses The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.

Raymond Danowski Has Your Chapbook by Jenny Jarvie

Wed, 29 July 2009 14:42:03 GMT

Amassing the world's largest collection of 20th century poetry was easy. Finding a home for it was a different story. Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.

Beat America by Aram Saroyan

Wed, 15 July 2009 11:13:06 GMT

“It's been more than a decade since the death of Allen Ginsberg, but in the interim I've found that he's stayed with me as an informing, tempering, guardian-like presence of a stature equaled only by my late father.” Aram Saroyan recalls his experiences with Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg.

The Pure Products of America Go Crazy by Ed Park

Tue, 7 July 2009 10:27:48 GMT

"It’s a mystery, the kind that we’ve seen in Berman’s songs, poems, and now his comics, a selection of which we’re showcasing here." Ed Park looks into the poetry of David Berman's drawings.