Featured Selection

      Introduction This is a vast country with such a mixed and turbulent political and social history – all of which has, necessarily, contributed its own elements to the poetic life of the nation – that it simply cannot be encapsulated in this short space. South Africa boasts eleven official languages, every one with its own rich blend

Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), versions by Michael Smith   Luis Cernuda was born in Seville in 1902. His father, Bernardo Cernuda Bousa, was a Puerto Rican settled in Seville, a commander of an Engineering Regiment; his mother, Amparo Bidon y Cuéllar, was a Sevillian of middle-class background. The poet had two sisters, Amparo and Ana. The father was a disciplinarian whose strictness

      In his first book of poetry, Analects on a Chinese Screen, Glenn Mott claims that the most interesting thing about him is that he is in China. I beg to differ. Mott’s China is not like the China others are “in.” It is not place but the perception of place that offers itself as the real. In

“Excerpted from Openwork: Poetry and Prose by André du Bouchet, selected, translated, and presented by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers. Reprinted with the permission of Yale University Press.”   APPEARING OCTOBER 2014 IN THE MARGELLOS SERIES OF THE YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS       . . .  this irreducible sign―deutungslos― . . .  a word beyond grasping, Cassandra’s word, a word from

    Over the past weeks I’ve returned to James Richardson’s VECTORS 4.1: A FEW THOUGHTS IN THE DARK and 4.2: ALL OF THE ABOVE, poems from his forthcoming collection, with the same obsessive frequency as when, decades ago, I first encountered Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”  To the same degree I was then, I’ve been

    BIO NOTE: No. 1 After much wandering, I am back here, though I never really left. It is still as vivid as ever though now mostly in variations and gradations of gray. Even though the old farmhouse and out buildings are decaying, I still find things I’d missed before, old implements in a shed, a large barn with entire

  Mitchell: I loved your playfulness in the title ABECEDARIAN; for example, you obviously intend for the title to designate the form the prose/poem inhabits, and perhaps reference its history in ancient literature and sacred texts.  However, as the noun “Abecedarian” means beginner, did you intend the title to introduce Adam/the speaker, Eve/the girl, the snake and even God, as

      Concentric Circles:  Page Hill Starzinger David Baker:  You are a poet and you are a business woman.  You’ve been living since 1980 in the East Village of Manhattan, but before we explore the present, I wonder if you could say a little bit about your origins—your father and mother, your family, your schooling, your beginnings.  We are

    Introduction for Up North Martha Collins   In the fall of 2004, I finished a book-length poem I’d been working on for some years.  During that time I wrote almost nothing else; now, on the other side of obsession, I had no idea how to even think about writing a free-standing lyric poem. I don’t quite remember how

A Note From Lisa Rose Bradford: Sadly, Juan Gelman has left us, dying yesterday, January 14th, just one day after I received an email thanking me, in his typically extraordinary way, for my joy and beauty. Though his death is crushing, his poetry will live on, proffering joy and beauty to his readers for generations to come. And as he