Poets
Story Stream
The Ecstatic Intimacies of Joe Brainard March 21, 2025
“I am a sucker for people who seem to do what they do just for you (me).” The artist and writer Joe Brainard dashed off this thought in 1969, in a letter to his friend and fellow-poet Bill Berkson. ...
The Ugly and Beautiful Gods March 21, 2025
Literature begins with the silence of the gods. As long as extra-human powers spoke to human beings, who communicated their messages in poems, stories, and dramas, “literature” in our contemporary sense could not exist. That we can now see writing as...
Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet? March 21, 2025
Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, taught school like his mother did before him, and became a farmer, the sleeping-in kind, since he w...
Born on a Day When God Was Ill March 12, 2025
The myth of César Vallejo, the Peruvian poet and hero of the avant-garde, precedes him. He’s the ailing hero of Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain (1984; translation 2010), a mystery novel in which a larger-than-life writer is attacked by a sudden bout o...
Formalism and Younger Poets July 22, 2024
Back in 1960, Robert Lowell punned on anthropological terms to divide American poetry into the raw and the cooked: poets, such as William Carlos Williams, who sought the impression of spontaneity (on the one hand) and poets (on the other) who revel i...
What the New York Times Missed July 17, 2024
Last week, The New York Times Book Review published a list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” (Well, so far, obviously. Why not just call it the best books of the last 25 years? Do they know something we don’t? Oh well.) To put it together,...
From Couplets to the Cosmos July 17, 2024
Poetry moves me, possibly too much. As a teenager, I memorized the poems I loved most, and by 28 I had “MORE POETRY!!!” (exclamation points included) tattooed on my left forearm. There are still poems today that I can’t hear a line of without whisper...
Percival Everett on the Paintings He Makes July 05, 2024
J.C. Gabel Talks to the Acclaimed Novelist and Poet About His Latest Art Exhibition....
The Silencing of the Jewish Poet April 18, 2024
Over the course of February 2024, I had exchanges and conversations, formal and informal, off and on record, with about 90 Jewish poets and translators, the majority of them living in the U.S., although some in Israel. They include some of today’s be...
Muse among the Drafts: Part II April 18, 2024
In a recent review of a work of contemporary video art, the novelist and poet Ben Lerner made a bizarre admission:I’ve always thought of artworks as a kind of CAPTCHA test that I might not pass. Am I feeling the right things at the right pitch of int...
The Poetics of Taylor Swift’s Style April 18, 2024
How should a poet dress? Since announcing her forthcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift—who’s been known to underline her albums’ themes and aesthetics with her own fashion choices—has shown us what, to her, a “tortured poet” loo...
Are Flying Cars Finally Here? April 17, 2024
A little more than a decade ago, Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm run by the entrepreneur, investor, and political gadfly Peter Thiel, issued a proclamation called “What Happened to the Future?” As an investment thesis, it was underwhelming—it a...
William H. Pritchard and the Twilight of Literary Criticism April 17, 2024
Ear Training is a retrospective collection of writings by nonagenarian William H. Pritchard, the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, at Amherst College. The author is an Amherst man through and through. He took the A. B. there in 1953 a...
The Poet Who Took It Personally April 16, 2024
Delmore Schwartz died in the early morning of July 11, 1966, in an ambulance on the way to Roosevelt Hospital. He’d been living alone in a seedy hotel near Times Square, reading compulsively and scribbling in the many notebooks that he kept during hi...
On Tomas Tranströmer April 16, 2024
I first read Tomas Tranströmer when I was fourteen or fifteen. I had started to write poems influenced by the Swedish postpunk band Imperiet, whose songs led me to one of their big influences, the Beat-and-Dylan-influenced poet Bruno K. Öijer. To kee...
On the Myth of the Middle Class Writer April 16, 2024
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington was for two years the sixth poet laureate of Santa Fe. He also sold his plasma to get by.I first met Wellington through the organization I co-founded, Economic Hardship Reporting Project, when I edited an essay about how he ...
The Metaverse of Fernando Pessoa April 15, 2024
At the beginning of this year, I visited Lisbon for the first time, and thought I’d enhance the experience by reading some books set in Portugal’s capital. First, I read Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, which is s...
Is Mary Oliver a Good Poet? April 12, 2024
This comes up every now and then. I remember someone a few years ago saying Mary Oliver was “poetry for people who don’t like poetry.” That’s not true, but even if it is, who cares? Anyway, it came up again when Maggie Zhu tweeted that Mary Oliver is...
An Interview With Maggie Nelson April 09, 2024
We have a sense, I think, of the false border sequestering art from theory. And so to remark on Maggie Nelson’s facility in mating the two is to say the least about how she does so—which is with a hurtling gusto that nonetheless invites us to pause a...
Why 'Carrie' Is Still Scary April 08, 2024
There are two great origin stories in the history of horror fiction. The first took place in Switzerland in 1816, but it began with a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Ash from Mount Tambora wrapped the planet in shade, leading to “th...
Why Poetry Matters February 22, 2024
Among the serious people who actually run the world, poetry does not rank high on their roster of concerns.That is a pity.In a world that is (as T. S. Eliot said in the first of his “Four Quartets”) “distracted from distraction by distraction,” poetr...
Is Taylor Swift Actually a Good Poet? February 16, 2024
Taylor Swift is notorious for the hidden clues and subtle allusions peppered throughout her work—the kind of stuff that her fans obsessively analyze. But she didn’t leave any ambiguity when she announced the title of her upcoming album, The Tortured ...
He Polarized Readers by Writing About His Late Wife February 16, 2024
From his hotel room in downtown Atlanta, Blake Butler could almost see the field where his late wife, the poet Molly Brodak, shot and killed herself in March 2020. “Every time I’ve come here since, I’ve driven to our old house. I’ve driven past where...
The Best Book Written on American Immigration February 16, 2024
In decades of studying the subject, the best book I have ever read about immigration, fiction or nonfiction, was written by a semi-obscure poet who shunned attention and died, scarcely noticed by the political world, in 2022.No, it’s not Camp of the ...
How Taylor Swift Beat Sinatra February 09, 2024
Taylor Swift launched the Midnights era at an awards show, announcing her tenth album during the 2022 VMAs. Maybe it was fate that she ended it at another, the Grammys, where she won her fourth Album of the Year trophy and kicked off her next release...
