Shane McCrae is the rare poet who can write a poem that is cool, easygoing, and deep—often all at once. He uses conversational language, casual references to pop culture, and slang as though he were talking to a circle of friends. With this mixture, he makes some of the most heartfelt new poems being written, offering a piercing rendition of how a truly contemporary consciousness—and conscience—deals with the ugliness of contemporary America, as well as with the old-fashioned human condition.
Peter Gizzi Peter Gizzi’s poems have always walked a line between stylized opacity and friendly, if melancholy, accessibility, enacting an argument about whether language is esoteric or generic, personal or public, our salvation from commerce or hopelessly commodified. This argument is at the heart of much contemporary poetry, but for Gizzi it also represents an […]
Cathy Park Hong’s poetry can be dark, depressing, grimly prophetic, and fun—often all at once. In Engine Empire, her third book, she examines how governments and companies use information to control people by throwing her voice in all sorts of surprising directions, assuming the personae of very odd, alliteratively bent characters from a fictional past and an imagined (yet possible) future whose experiences warn us about the realities of the present.
Rilke has had plenty of remarkable translators, most famously, Stephen Mitchell. All have produced fine versions of Rilke’s unrelentingly intense and sculptural poems, but only Edward Snow has tuned his ear to most or all of Rilke’s body of work.
How is it that a poet can do almost nothing new in a succession of books and yet still sound utterly awake to the fresh possibilities of language? This is the question that John Ashbery’s work has posed for at least the last fifteen years. The criticisms one can make of Planisphere, his twenty-fifth collection of new poems, are obvious and hardly original: Ashbery is writing more of the same kinds of poems he has been at for decades—short, disjunctive lyrics, fragmentary voice-collages, quirky lists, abortive philosophical tirades, oblique meditations on mortality. He is no longer thinking vigorously—as he did
Every aging poet seems to write a book confronting his or her own mortality. By the time they do, many have already fallen into a rut, but John Koethe’s philosophical and wistful Ninety-fifth Street is his best book yet. In these accessible and surprisingly powerful poems, Koethe looks back at his youth, his encounters with his literary heroes and his evolution as a poet himself. “That’s what poetry is,” he writes, “a way to live through time, / And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back.”
Much contemporary poetry gets written off as too “experimental”—perhaps because of how crazy the poems look on the page, because they’re full of fragmentary images and half-finished thoughts, because they’re slathered in irony, or because they take poetry itself as their subject. Yet many of the most off-the-wall poets are actually writing about the same things—parenthood, love, sex, the environment, and the joys of literature—as their more straightforward contemporaries but have chosen to describe experience using untraditional means. Here are a few great books that embrace the experimental side of poetry. Like Wind Loves a Window by Andrea Baker This
In the post–James Frey world, there is much debate about where to draw the line between nonfiction and fiction. The essential argument concerns literature’s responsibility to the facts: Can a memoir engage in a degree of imagining in the service of telling an emotional truth? Is an autobiographical novel really a memoir trying to pass as a work of fiction? And what of poetry, a genre in which fact and fantasy commingle? C. D. Wright’s One Big Self—the poetic half of her collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster (the photographic version was published as a limited edition in 2003)—attempts some answers.
In the age of e-mail’s immediacy, we have all but lost the sense of what a letter is: half of an extended, extemporaneous conversation that tries to anticipate and respond to its other half, as well as reward rereading over the comparatively long lag time between missives. Jennifer Firestone and Dana Teen Lomax’s Letters to Poets, an anthology of correspondence between fourteen pairs of poets, tries to reclaim the expansiveness and durability of snail mail. Inspired by the centennial of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, the editors sought to create a personal dialogue around the poetics and
