I’ve held off reading the last few poems in Jack Gilbert’s latest (The Dance Most of All) for months. Literally. Gilbert is one of those rare touchstone authors I was just ruminating about...

Amy King shares this press release condemning the Publisher’s Weekly 2009 Best Books list(s). You can read it and judge for yourself, but it is thought-provoking. I have a couple of thoughts: (and Amy King took great offense to this) There’s a...

The October 2009 issue of Poetry has a great book review by Jason Guriel, exemplifying just the kind of review I like to read: respectful, insightful, honest and entertaining. Guriel’s quite perceptive, getting to the heart of the craft of two very...

[photo by Aube Insanite] “The eyes of man are sun-like, because art comes and makes them more sun-like. Art is so mighty because it changes our perception of the world. It is almost as mighty as philosophy and not nearly so harmful, because it does...

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An acquaintance reminded me of another sonnet by Cummings that I like and whose lyric qualities defend it quite well from accusations of sentimentality (and, as my acquaintance noted, “lyric poetry is apt to involve sentiment, and therefore to...