On Poetry
December 28, 2011
Race and American Poetry: Dove v. Vendler 34
by Jonathan Farmer
Vendler asks us to think of value in terms of a hypothetical and permanent future, one that will have unvarying and therefore conclusive notions of what was good and bad in our writing. It’s an exasperating argument, since it asks us to defer to the critic’s mystical conjuring of our far off progeny, a population that will, of course, have the same values as the critic herself.
November 25, 2011
A Wanderer in Poem Forest 0
by Marni Berger
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.”
October 11, 2011
“I am the turnstile”: Roaming with Tomas Tranströmer 3
by Steve Himmer
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.
October 3, 2011
A Poet Laureate from the Proletariat: An Appreciation of Philip Levine 9
by Bill Morris
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.
July 4, 2011
Embracing The Other I Am; or, How Walt Whitman Saved My Life 14
by Michael Bourne
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.
April 22, 2011
A Year with Peter Porter 1
by Ben Hamilton
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.
