Difficult Loves Difficult Loves
It wasn't until 1996, when President Bill Clinton declared April to be National Poetry Month, that the eminent translator and poet Richard Howard truly grasped the significance o...
Sep 16, 2004 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella
Ugly Beauty Ugly Beauty
In the fall of 1958, the second book by a young British poet named Philip Larkin made it across the ocean and into the consciousness of American poetry.
Jun 10, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Melanie Rehak
Wild at Heart Wild at Heart
In 1947 Saul Bellow published a novel called The Victim in which a derelict character named Kirby Allbee haunts another named Asa Leventhal, claiming that Leventhal is responsibl...
May 27, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Vivian Gornick
Darkness Visible Darkness Visible
Shortly after the first anniversary of September 11, when The New Yorker had published a slew of poems memorializing the events of that day--Galway Kinnell's "When the Towers F...
May 13, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Lexi Rudnitsky
Happy 30th Anniversary Discovery/The Nation Happy 30th Anniversary Discovery/The Nation
Blindness and Transparency I can't say. Is it better to close your eyes, or to go unseen?
May 6, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Various Contributors
What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?
For a man ostensibly telling us what narcissism means to him, Tony Hoagland sure lets his friends do a lot of the talking. But maybe that's the point. In other people, he sees hi...
Jan 30, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Megan Marz
The War of Words The War of Words
Many rhetorical bombshells were lobbed by British and American poets during the political turmoil of the 1930s, but few detonated as loudly as this cluster of words: "Today t...
Dec 24, 2003 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella
A Poet of Multitudes A Poet of Multitudes
Pablo Neruda is often compared to Walt Whitman. In fact, the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner outdid Whitman in some respects.
Dec 4, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Jay Parini
Mystic Poet Mystic Poet
Most biographies of literary figures are a wonderful substitute for actually having to read the work.
Nov 20, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Terry Eagleton
Full Moon Full Moon
Clouds curdle round it, crack open, let it through. Radiance shades by cloudshapes; fat fruit of incandescence; sphere of peeled silver. I wonder
Nov 13, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Eamon Grennan