The nuts that make up this poem were what I wrote on postcards to my friend the poet Genine Lentine. She was living at the San Francisco Zen Center, which has its sister temple, Tassajara, in Carmel Valley, CA, where I was going to live for the summer of 2010.  MORE

For a few years, I've been writing poems in which I use the natural environment as a force field and I try to receive frequencies, intuitions, from natural beauty to fuel and form a poem, in the same way radio waves and microwaves and light waves in the atmosphere carry content and meaning. MORE

"After All These Years You Know They Were Wrong about the Sadness of Men Who Love Men" was written after a weekend in Palm Springs with my friend Matt. He lives in Los Angeles and invited me to join him and a group of his friends, most of whom I didn't know, to celebrate his birthday. I was anxious about spending the weekend as an outsider and wondered if I'd be stuck in a house with strangers with whom I had no history or relationships.  MORE

The Volta was hatched out of a couple things: I had been editing a journal called Rabbit Light Movies (poemfilms and videos of poets reading, online) and another journal calledEvening Will Come, which published poets' short poetics essays, starting with C.D. Wright. Sara Renee Marshall and I decided to combine a number of these things—movies, essays, book reviews, interviews, poems, questionnaires—into one space and just call it The Volta. MORE

One of the striking fates of poetry over the last century has been the conflation of poem with lyric. But some of the most important poems for me have always been non-lyric genres: epigram; epistle; lais; 17th-Century French drama; et cetera.  MORE

Comedians do more than make us laugh; they woo crowds into the world of a joke. With facial tics and anaphora and alligator shoes, they often sit us down in neighborhoods we distrust or are not privy to. They make us feel safe, activate the car alarm then crowbar the window for the knock off satchel sunning in the passenger seat. MORE

This poem is the postscript to the 70-page title piece from my book The Year of the Rooster, which I spent most of a year or two writing, wrestling with the artifice of character. I was trying to figure out who this Roo was and why s/he kept bothering me, cutting a furrow at the outer-most edge of my thoughts by pacing back and forth there, exactly along the newly-forged neural pathway from too much thinking about Alice Notley's wonderfully vitriolic, fearless, mammoth, and terrific Disobedience.  MORE

To this nineteen-year-old in the 1960's, the discovery of Biographica Literaria was like landing on the moon: I stood shakily on new ground in a place I discovered had been giving me light for the five or six years I had been writing poems. Though I could not have formulated it quite yet since I only experienced my discovery as a sort of frisson,Coleridge was giving me a way to think about the creative process. MORE

The retrievals that Donald Allen made of Frank O'Hara's poems began in 1968 with his sorting through the manuscripts of poetry and prose in cartons and files that Kenneth Koch took away for safekeeping in two suitcases from Frank's loft at 791 Broadway the night in July, 1966, after Frank died––the nearly 700 items that first Kenneth and I and then Frank's sister Maureen and her husband at the time Walter Granville-Smith subsequently photocopied a few weeks later. MORE

Alexander Vvedensky was, with Daniil Kharms, the ringleader of OBERIU, a small group of young avant-garde writers that gave readings together in Leningrad in the late 1920s. He composed this poem and recited it to Kharms in January 1930. MORE

As a teenager, yearning to leave my small hometown in the South and hungry for literature, I managed to get myself to New York City's Upper West Side.  Without any money, lonely and out of my depth, whatever that could have been, I spent most of my time digging around for books of poetry to read in the dark innards of Columbia University's Butler Library.  I'd studied Spanish in high school, and was on the prowl.  Well, in no time, I found poems by Miguel Hernández. MORE

Last Friday, April 5th, in the Grand Gallery of our home base, the National Arts Club at 15 Gramercy Park, we hosted the 103rd Annual Awards Ceremony of the Poetry Society of America. I cannot imagine a better account of the proceedings than that written by Madge McKeithen for theBest American Poetry blog.  All photographs were taken by Lawrence Schwartzwald. MORE

I always think of the "tesseract" in A Wrinkle in Time when I consider the power of a truly original piece of writing. The tesseract, in case you don't remember, is a kind of fifth-dimension occurrence that folds time and space, leading different times to touch the way the fabric of a skirt touches when it folds on itself. Certain poems, I often think, are tesseracts—so singular that they seem to exist in multiple times at once, transporting us outside our own interiority, our era, our personal history.  MORE

I first became familiar with Sir Thomas Wyatt's "Epigram XLI" from Jacqueline Osherow's essay on ottava rima in An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (ed. Annie Finch & Kathrine Varnes, U of Michigan P). I have been using this book for the last several years as a text for my Craft of Poetry course for the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program. MORE

Much of the work in my book, The Youngest Butcher in Illinois, was driven by a need to make sense of things from my life and, more specifically, family history. This poem is one of the oldest in the collection (I wrote it seven years ago). I included it because I thought it set up some of the book's concerns, and as such, it feels like the grandparent to others. However, unlike most of the poems in my book which were spawned by language—a line, a word— an idea shaped this one. MORE

Inception: I found myself writing 'The Contagious Knives" in a fury of contagion; a corrosive tide of rage and frustration at the state of the world, its steady state of exploitation, coercion, misery, metals, charisma. Everything comes out in the river, as Steve Jobs, now dead, said at TED: first time as industrial waste, second time as carcinogen. MORE

As a poet I've become increasingly interested in sound: how it works on the surface of a poem to disturb the image reservoirs below it, how morphemes and phonemes carry semantics, how slight disruptions in each bend meaning, how clang association makes oneirologic. I've become more and more involved in music, blues in particular, over the past several years, so I think that informs my poetry. MORE

When I was in high school men started hitting on me and I wasn't sure what to do. Most of my life I'd been trying to be a less assertive presence in the world (the general opinion of my elders and peers was that I needed to exercise humility, be less bossy, be less of a know-it-all, start fewer fights). I wanted to be a good daughter/ sister/ Sunday school student/ girl-scout/ slumber party guest and I suffered embarrassment and even grief whenever anyone indicated to me that I'd been, for example, a combative goody-goody attention-hog.  MORE

Intro

"Hand-Me-Down Halloween" was almost the title poem of my first book. It has no epigraph, but if it did, it would have one of the following: This really happened. — Me. None of this happened. —Me. MORE

Some research recently revealed that it is not too much information that is stressful or overwhelming, it's too much information that seems to be meaningful. For example a walk in the woods is full of enormous input: animal sounds, plant and dirt smells, textures, air moving, piles upon piles of elaborate visual details, and yet a walk in the woods is considered relaxing. MORE

I grew up in a very traditional, Latino Catholic family. I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through high school. Despite this, we were not "strict" Catholics. We went to church on Sundays, etc, but our faith was more of a backdrop to our family life than a focal point. MORE

"My syntax shift" is both at the heart of Desiring Map and an outlier in the book.  It is the only poem that uses the sentence as unit of composition, hence its title—so, in that way it certainly works within a different cadence, a different logic from the other poems. The poem also marks a shift in the book—away from the dreamy renderings of place in the sequence that it concludes and into the more concrete spatiality of the Kansas plains.   MORE

I grew up in a town that was predominately Irish Catholic, yet I was raised Protestant, Congregationalist. I went to church until I decided I didn't want to go anymore, which was when I was about eight. I liked that we got new shoes on Easter, but being in the shadow of a dominant religion put me in the role of the outsider, which is probably best for an artist.  MORE

The truth is I had gotten obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Why are these considered girls' books? People are building log cabins! They're digging wells! They're getting chased by panthers and dying of starvation and eating the curliest part of the pig, the tail! They're sucking horehound, the most lawless candy! Territories are declaring statehood. People are waking up in the Dakotas at last. MORE

I don't remember exactly how I wrote this poem. I remember that it occurred quickly and required only a little revision. It is my personal favorite poem in a collection I wrote called Hider Roser, but I'm not sure why. I like reading it aloud and always include it in my set list when reading to an audience. MORE

Isaak Walton's The Life of Mr George Herbert opens by telling us, "George Herbert was born the third day of April, in the year of our redemption 1593." But the priest-poet had few readers until three centuries after that date. During his lifetime he never published a book, and it is only because Herbert placed the manuscript of The Temple in the hands of a friend that we know of his poems at all. MORE

Poetry came into my life before I could hold it in my mind, or turn it over with a thought or a prayer. Poetry came into my life as sound, and that sound was orchestrated by a children's poet, also an anthologist, who served as Poet-in-the-Schools for my district: Myra Cohn Livingston. MORE

After I'd written "Flemish," I realized that it contained many unresolved and insoluble  puzzles, and that was fine with me.  Belgium, Flanders, Benelux, Low Country—so many words associated with this tiny and stunningly gifted land. It speaks Dutch, French, German, and its own dialects. MORE

Dutch is not my mother tongue, but it is my mother's tongue. Though my brother and I were not raised bilingually, we've heard it all our lives. The sound of the language first and always precedes its meanings to me (Frost's "the sound of sense"). In the past two years, I have been studying a small group of Dutch poets and writers, mostly reading them aloud MORE

May  Be! was conceived of while I was in the throes of a poetic-critical double bind as the Occupy movement was surging in the Fall of 2011. At the outset of that momentous event, the first "bind" / subjective impulse I had to confront was the go! go! go! of the immediate moment.  MORE

I love Shelley. I have a tattoo of the sketch he made for his boat, in which he soon after drowned. But like many of us who love Shelley, I do not love all of his poems. There are many Shelleys. And I like a lot of them, but life is too short (he would know) to read another verse drama. MORE

I'm disappointed when writers, in discussing their work, interpret it for their readership.  This seems a violation of the literary contract between author and reader.  That in mind, here I'll lay bare the ideas that undergird "Violet for Your Furs" without doing you the disservice of deciphering individual images.  Cataloguing these ideas will require some name-dropping.  Bear with and forgive me. MORE

I was just starting out when I stumbled upon John Keats's last serious gesture in poetry, the final fragment, a terminal point. I felt the blood in his hand, the trauma of what could never be finished, the lure of the partially whole, and it has reminded me ever since that poetry is a bloody art. It's a form of play, true, but the stakes are mortal. Everything is on the line. MORE

Yu Xuanji, a courtesan and female poet, wrote during the Tang Dynasty which was also considered the golden age for art and literature in China. She is still, in many ways, a mysterious figure as she lived her life as a concubine, wife, a doaist "nun," and as a resident of Chang'an's pleasure district.  MORE

Here are the first twenty strophes of our translation of Aimé Césaire's 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. This 725 line poem is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. To date commentary on it has focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric, material that Césaire only added to the revised 1956 text which turns out to be the fourth, and until now, primarily known version of the work. MORE

When I was finishing up my book, my editor suggested I write a few new poems for the final section, poems that would perhaps move closer toward the idea of hope that sits in the book's title. This is one of three poems I wrote in that frenzied couple of weeks (I've never written so quickly in my life!) and, like most of my poems, I don't really know how it came to move from my head to the page to making any kind of sense. MORE

I began Partially Kept in dialogue with the great 17th century essayist, Sir Thomas Browne while reading The Garden of Cyrus. My career-long practice has been to link my own writing to the writing of others and often to those I have taught (Shakespeare for Why/Why Not, W.G. Sebald forVertigo), so that intellectual inquiry and creative inquiry inform one another, so that I find myself in the magnetic field of someone else's range and diction, so that I am moved out beyond mere self-reflection.  MORE

Of all poets associated with the symbolist movement, Stéphane Mallarmé is surely the most influential, most difficult, and most worth clinging to. MORE

I began work on "The Maud Poems" several years before my mother died. I wasn't interested in autobiography but I wasinterested in my mother's particular vernacular and vocal imprint. She was an older mother for the time, she'd grown up in Topeka, Kansas, after the first world war; her father had left, her mother Olive ran a boarding house, and her uncle Meldrum owned a funeral parlor. MORE

As this is the third of a projected five-part multi-year series, we have reached the half-way point of Latino/a Poetry Now. It has become clear that these online discussions are as important and meaningful as the public multi-author readings.  MORE

I wanted to mess with the term novel, to suggest a vagueness, an amateur quality. Amateur which suggests homemade, authentic. I like that, of course. I also thought of all the evocations the word poet has—it's so rich and problematic I wanted the word poet to be in the title too.  MORE

This earlier version of the poem had the same basic stanzaic shape, action, and deployment of images as "Mappa Mundi" does now but its tempo and temperament were much different: the imagination was less musical and there was far less torque between what was being seen, felt and spoken.  MORE

The poem called "Promenade sentimentale" is found in Paul Verlaine's first book, the Poèmes saturniens (1866), in a section called "Paysages tristes" ("Sad Landscapes"). It is a kind of show-piece of sonic effects, in a book full of virtuoso display, both intellectual and technical, on the part of its young author. The poems in this section of the book are almost all focused on a single time of day—dusk, moving into night—and are dedicated to charting a kind of psychological restlessness, mystery, and dis-ease through means both visual and aural.  MORE

Writing about Mary Jo Bang's new translation of Dante'sInferno (Graywolf Press, 2012) in Vanity Fair, Elissa Schappell declares, "readers who once considered Dante's terza rima rhyme scheme and allusions to 14th-century Florentine politics as their own circle of pain will find Bang's free-verse approach, wit, and poetic pyrotechnics heavenly." We present Bang's translation of the first Canto, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher. MORE