The New York Times Picks Poetry

John Williams introduces the newspaper's focus on poetry, which resulted in a slew of fabulous articles this past weekend about an impressive list of poetry legends and debuts. Williams notes that not one but a number of editors on staff are heavily responsible for the jaw-dropping compendium, then Williams brings to reader's attention a few of these editors' favorites. "Assuming that we’ve all read — or at least know to read — Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin and other giants, I asked a few of my colleagues to suggest poets whose work they believe should be better known," Williams explains. Let's pick up there:

Gregory Cowles, an editor at the Book Review, is also our best-seller list columnist and resident poetry guru — his fingerprints are all over this issue, which is devoted to verse. He recommended Angie Estes, describing her poetry as “slippery, swerving work” that “romps on a playground of art history and pop culture and etymology. From the title poem to her 2009 book ‘Tryst’ (a poem that opens with the Roman god of medicine and ends with Marlon Brando in Beverly Hills): ‘Sweet art, / sweetheart: in VitaNuova, Dante invokes / Beatrice to show how tryst was once/the same word as triste, also related to / truce, how close it feels / to trust.’”

From Estes we travel back 13 centuries thanks to Alida Becker, another editor here, who singled out the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai. “Mahler was inspired by him. Also Ezra Pound,” Becker said. “And now that we’re embarking on the Chinese century, shouldn’t we be more familiar with their classics? These days, it ought to be easy to get into the spirit of one of his most famous poems, ‘Drinking Alone by Moonlight.’ ”

Read on at the New York Times.