My first thought, when got the shocking and delightful news of my receiving the Frost Medal, was to wonder if someone had gotten their Marilyns mixed up. They must mean Marilyn Hacker, I thought: she really deserves it. As the news sank in I thought of other poets equally deserving. Then I thought about how my mother would say this puts me together with Tracy K. Smith, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dwayne Betts, and Wanda Coleman as evincing a new force in African American poetry. It was only after I'd read the list of Frost Medalists on the Poetry Society's website that I felt the humbling honor of having being granted such recognition during my lifetime.  MORE

Mostly, for me, writing is a feral act. Mostly I am consumed by a hunch, irritated, harassed or made uncomfortable by something I can only clumsily accuse. I approach images and words as though they are a criminal or maybe just a far-flung snarl, and maybe that snarl is coming from me—I don't always know, though mostly I am the only one in the room. MORE

Full disclosure: despite my seven-year stint as a third-chair clarinetist, my musical vocabulary is limited to simian gestures, deep nods, and stink-face grimaces. No doubt, if I could describe, in proper terms, how music does what it does, I would be a phenomenally wealthy woman. MORE

Poet, concert singer, actress, novelist, and translator, the late Norma Farber was the author of thirty-five books. Her poems appeared in countless periodicals including The New Yorker,The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. Now, nearly three decades after her death, comes her previously unpublished Year of Reversible Loss MORE

Xi Chuan (pronounced Sshee Chwahn, not to be confused with Sichuan, the province), one of contemporary China's most celebrated poets, was born in Jiangsu in 1963 with the name Liu Jun, which means "army," reflecting the ethos of the era.  MORE

A first-generation American, the daughter of immigrants from tiny villages in Eastern Europe, I grew up in New York City with a strong sense of Jewish identity—kosher household, family Seders, synagogue on the High Holidays—and mixed messages about Jewish observance. Every Friday evening my mother would light the Shabbes candles, and my father would light his cigarette from the candles. MORE

It was almost a year and half from the time when the idea took hold until we actually opened the doors. There were small-town politics at play (according to one man, the bookstore, which was originally going to be at a different location, would endanger the lives of his children) and complicated zoning laws, as well as renovations that had to be made. We're in a volunteer fire station now. But there's no pole. There never was a pole.  MORE

Now approaching ninety, Yves Bonnefoy is often acclaimed as France's greatest contemporary author. In selecting and translating the pieces for Second Simplicity, an anthology of his recent verse and poetic prose, I have been profoundly impressed by his enduring freshness of vision, his unabated will to set out anew. MORE

For a number of years—and I suppose still—I've felt somewhat helplessly concerned with the figure of the Greek Chorus. I'd written a number of poems revolving around the Chorus before this one: a sonnet once, and another poem based on Eurpides's Herakles. MORE

Am I a poet?  I haven't written many poems lately, so perhaps I'm not actually a poet but rather an arts admin bureaucrat who had some possibly worthwhile daydreaming episodes years ago and now talks about those episodes as if he knows what he's talking about. Am I a novelist? I probably need to publish another one to be considered as such. Oh well.  MORE

I almost never write a poem with a sense of what it will be about. I don't use preexisting forms (traditional or otherwise), writing exercises, or poetic formal devices to generate material. At this point in my writing life, I do tend to think about a whole manuscript while I'm composing individual poems, so I might begin a poem in relation to a manuscript with the thought that it should be a longer poem, or a shorter one, or perhaps lighter in tone, or maybe more fierce. But overall, I prefer to keep the parameters loose. MORE

When we started Burning Deck Magazine in 1961, it happened to be the moment when letterpress printing was being replaced by offset, and print shops were dumping their letterpress equipment. We were graduate students at the University of Michigan, so buying a letterpress and learning to print seemed the only way we could afford publishing.  MORE

While arranging the shelves for the current configuration of the store, I decided that Cormac McCarthy's books would always appear in the same place. That is to say, regardless of where the alphabet would situate them, they will always appear at eye level, on one particular shelf. Other authors' names may appear before or after McCarthy's in the common order, but because of where we are, the popularity of his titles, and the laws of marketing, McCarthy has trumped the alphabet.  MORE

We grew up right next to the Tennessee River, and the beauty of that going-by gave me, early on, a truer sense of the sacred. I had a place I would go to be by myself, and feel that living presence inside me. It is still there. I was, and am, a river mystic. A riparian, riverine aesthetic flows in my writing much more vitally than any Christian influence. The shining reaches are downriver, upriver, under, and spread out into the sky all at once, a definite place, and a station of awareness too. MORE

The world of this poem grew from a simple wish to play on the word "felt."  I like the fact that the word houses both the material and the act of feeling (or the act of having felt). Also, at the time I wrote the poem, I was very interested in Joseph Beuys's work and was learning about his symbolic interest in materials like felt and wax.  MORE

Despite the way mainstream books are sold, genres are, of course, porous and I'm not invested in defining or sustaining them as either writer or reader. I wanted to write in a way I had not written before: to begin with characters modeled on people, to begin with a story. I think those aims can be accommodated in poetry, but I am mostly a lyric poet and my poems aren't driven by stories or characters. MORE

God was all around but not everywhere. My parents were not Born Again people or heavy-handed Christians. We were United Methodists. We went to Church once a week, at the standard time, and on the traditional holy day of Sunday but not in between. We were not a family who stayed in church all day, as some families in our small town did. We were in at 11 a.m. and out by 1 or 1:30 p.m. MORE

Endowed by the family and friends of Geraldine Clinton Little, a poet and author of short stories and former vice-president of the PSA, for a book of poetry written by a single author who is a permanent resident of the United States. The book must be published by a small press, non-profit, or university press in a standard edition in 2011.  MORE

We at the Poetry Society congratulate Tracy K. Smith, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection, Life on Mars. Tracy is pictured here with Yusef Komunyakaa (winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize that same year for his collection, Neon Vernacular.) MORE