Featured Selection

    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

  Introduction, by Rachel Zucker I am frequently asked, “What does your husband think about these poems?” When students ask versions of this question their teachers seem embarrassed or upset, as if such a question inappropriately assumes that my work is autobiographical and that this assumption is unsophisticated. I’m not always sure how to answer the question, but I identify

Plume: The closing line of the poem “Anthropocene”– published by the Virginia Quarterly Review in 2007- asks the question: Is there shelter in the blank page? Similarly, one could ask if humankind takes shelter in the start of its own “blank page,” in the continuous restart which is always the awareness of there being a new day, a next day,

By way of introduction to this month’s collaborative “Featured Selection,” per usual first a brief introductory essay by the poet, followed by the work itself, and some biographical material.     Inner Geography on landscape, poetics and horsemanship A river is a useful image and metaphor—through line that it is—just as thought and one’s expression of thinking in writing is

By way of introduction to this month’s “Featured Selection,” first a brief introductory essay – or rather a self-interview by the poet – followed by the work itself, and concluding with some biographical material.   Interview: Bruce Smith by Bruce Smith   Interviewer:  Why do you resist the interview? Author:  I don’t like the interview as it has displaced criticism,

By way of introduction to this month’s collaborative “Featured Selection,” first a brief introductory essay by the poets themselves, followed by the work itself, and some biographical material.   Maureen and Denise collaborated one poem at a time via email—Maureen from New Mexico, and Denise from Portugal. Both places were experiencing unusually high temps–and the poets were just trying to