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Mu!
To what shall I liken the world? Moonlight, reflected In dewdrops, Shaken from a crane’s bill. –Dogen
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Why We Read Poetry: Exhibit 3: Milosz
A Story Now I will tell Meader’s story; I have a moral in view. He was pestered by a grizzly so bold and malicious That he used to snatch caribou meat from the eaves of the cabin. Not only that. He...
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The Two Tests of Poetry: Auden as Reader
Speaking for myself, the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: “Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?” The second is, in the broadest sense,...
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Three New Poems from Nobel-Prize Winner, Tomas Transtromer
The New York Review of Books has published three new, previously untranslated poems by Tomas Transtromer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this month. Click here to see the poems and an...
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Bring It Back to What You Feel
Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of maneuvering. You may feel the doorknob more strongly than some big personal event,...
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Why We Read Poetry: Exhibit 5: Whitman
Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions, Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who...
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Endurance
A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring. –William Carlos Williams
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Remembering Adrienne Rich
“We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break...
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‘Secure Amid All Losses’: Celan on Poetry After the Holocaust
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers,...
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Whitman on Writing in the Moment
The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or...
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