Try Not to Shield Your Eyes: On Mathew Henderson’s The Lease

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This collection’s full of little details, turns of phrase that you just know other writers are going to try and steal.
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Topographies of Desire: The Millions Interviews Megan Kaminski

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One of my good friends is a very successful novelist. I was with her when she was approached by another (male) writer who was attempting to deride her work: “Aren’t all your books about the same thing?” My friend asked him what he meant by that. He replied without missing a beat — “Well, aren’t they all about women?”
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Playing Telephone with Emily Dickinson and Paul Legault

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Legault transports Dickinson into mostly fortune-cookie length snippets of contemporary English, a dialect spoken widely in urban pockets like Brooklyn, where increasing numbers of the highly educated and literary classes live, procreate, keep each other amused, and make their own cheese.
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The Poetry of Mental Unhealth: Philip Larkin

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Readers have a perfect right to regard Philip Larkin, as I do not, as a complete shit. But if they consider his personal failings indistinguishable from his poetry, I think the loss is theirs.
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Post-40 Bloomer: Spencer Reece, The Poet’s Tale

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We needed such a story. The romance, the sense of “close call." We need these stories to counter the inevitability of obscurity; we need stories that kindle our sense of hope, and possibility. In truth, I wouldn’t blame fans or journalists for altering or exaggerating the story. I understand why we need it to be as dramatic as possible.
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Dream a Little Dream of Me: John Berryman

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Among the adjectives Vendler applies to Henry are “regressive, petulant, hysterical, childish, cunning, hypersexual, boastful, frightened, shameless, and revengeful.” Also, “complaining, greedy, lustful, and polymorphously perverse.” Did we miss anything? How about self-pitying, irresponsible, envious, and grandiose?
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Race and American Poetry: Dove v. Vendler

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We can, should, and will continue to argue about artistic quality, but we should do so while remembering that poetry can only live in the minds of living readers, and that its value comes out of their encounters with individual poems, which are, thank god, incredibly various (both the poems and the encounters.)
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A Wanderer in Poem Forest

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My grandfather died two weeks ago, in his bed, by the sea in Maine. Two days earlier, perhaps with a little help from his morphine, he looked out his bay window and said: 'I am going to run across that water.'
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“I am the turnstile”: Roaming with Tomas Tranströmer

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I'm a rank amateur, but when I read the Boston Globe’s dismissal of Tranströmer as “an elderly Swedish poet virtually unknown outside his homeland,” it felt necessary to speak up with the voice of an amateur.
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A Poet Laureate from the Proletariat: An Appreciation of Philip Levine

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I came upon a book of poems that proved to me that art can be made from absolutely anything, from a night-shift job at Chevy Gear & Axle or a job picking Gravenstein apples.
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Embracing The Other I Am; or, How Walt Whitman Saved My Life

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The first edition of Leaves of Grass is a poetical Declaration of Independence in so many ways it can be hard to keep track of them all.
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A Year with Peter Porter

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Porter had a united vision of the arts, switching in his conversation between literature, music and painting on a whim, but talking about each discipline with equal authority and interest. And then I read his poetry.
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American Laurels: The Poets Laureate Anthology

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As a volume in the cultural history of American poetry, there's no doubt that Elizabeth Hun Schmidt's The Poets Laureate Anthology is a valuable text. For starters, it's the only book of its kind.
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In the Company of Amy Clampitt

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Two years ago I spent some time in Lenox, Massachusetts, at a house once owned by the poet Amy Clampitt. I slept in her bed, rifled through her books, gazed out the kitchen window at the tree by which her ashes are buried.
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Dada Pedagogy: Andrei Codrescu’s The Poetry Lesson

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Will The Poetry Lesson create better poets?  I don't know, but all those who read it will be better travelers in the world of poetry.
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No More Irony: A Review of Monica Youn’s Ignatz

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I was suspicious of Ignatz’s subgenre: poetry books that are designedly books rather than collections, their titles linked by a single unifying conceit. The category was proliferating, it seemed to me, cultured by a world of book prizes and writing programs, or encouraged by distinguished precedents and obvious advantages.
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War Comes Home: Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise

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Contemporary war, in America at least, is now defined as much by coming home as it is by shipping out.
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Machine Gun Sonnets

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World War I, when educated and idealistic young men wrote of mustard gas and aerial bombardment using sonnets and couplets.
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