Poetry

Browse our essays and reviews on poetry.

Longing for the Real

  • Hosea Hirata

Our Scandal

  • Charles Simic

In Search of the Authentic Other

The Araki Yasusada “hoax” and what it reveals about the politics of poetic identity.

  • Marjorie Perloff
with responses from
  • Charles Simic
  • Hosea Hirata
  • John Bradley
  • Eliot Weinberger
  • Stephen Owen
  • Greg Glazner & Jon Davis
  • Juliana Chang & Walter K. Lew & Tan Lin & Eileen Tabios & John Yau
  • Arthur Vogelsang

Poet’s Sampler: Jeff Clark

  • Heather McHugh
  • Jeff Clark

High Windows and Four-Letter Words

Ssaying "fuck" and "bloody" is like contemplating the depth of the ocean.

  • Stephanie Burt

Review: W. S. Merwin’s The Vixen

  • Richard Howard

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Review: Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters

  • Bonnie Costello

Imagining the Nation

On poetry from Vietnam.

  • Nguyen Ba Chung

Identity and Immunity

In the face of the AIDS crisis, physical expressions of love are as revolutionary as the act of writing poetry.

  • Rafael Campo

New South African Poetry

  • Peter Anderson
  • Kim Cooper

Review: Carl Philips’s In the Blood

  • Stephen Tapscott

Review: Elaine Brown’s Taste of Power

  • Farah Jasmine Griffin

Making It New

For a second generation of Holocaust writers, the wounds are still open but the language is closed.

  • Jonathan Wilson

Influences

On the power of T.S. Eliot.

  • Seamus Heaney

Poet’s Sampler: Ha Jin

  • Ha Jin
  • Allen Grossman

Candidates for Survival

A Talk with Harold Bloom

  • Harold Bloom
  • Ellen Spirer

Heaney Agonistes

In Station Island, Seamus Heaney continues his personal struggle with the meaning of the Irish past and the relation of poetry to poitics.

  • Shaun O’Connell

The Eye of the Outsider

On the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.

  • Adrienne Rich

Poet to Poet

A conversation with Mark Strand.

  • Mark Strand
  • Richard Tillinghast

I. A. Richards at Harvard

The most extraordinary teacher of poetry I ever encountered.

  • Helen Vendler

The Marxist Poets of Beacon Hill

  • Alan Wald

Returning to the Heartland

On the poetry of James Wright.

  • Bonnie Costello

Poetry and Power

On Seamus Heaney.

  • Shaun O’Connell

William Carlos Williams in a World of Painters

His great achievement was to bring some of the qualities of painting into poetry.

  • Bonnie Costello
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