"...for poetry to be used as an instrument of seduction, the first requirement is that it be understood. No American girl was likely to fall for a guy who reads her love poems in Serbian as they sip Coke."

"Like most literary geeks, I’ve read a lot of Jorge Luis Borges. If you haven’t, look into the influences of your favorite writers, and you may find the Argentine short-story craftsman appearing with Beatles-like frequency. Indeed, Borges’ body of work radiates inspiration far beyond the realm of the short story, and even beyond literature as commonly practiced. Creators from David Foster Wallace to Alex Cox to W.G. Sebald to the Firesign Theater have all, from their various places on the cultural landscape, freely admitted their Borgesian leanings. That Borges’ stories — or, in the more-encompassing term adherents prefer to use, his “fictions” — continue to provide so much fuel to so many imaginations outside his time and tradition speaks to their simultaneous intellectual richness and basic, precognitive impact. Perhaps “The Garden of Forking Paths” or “The Aleph” haven’t had that impact on you, but they’ve surely had it on an artist you enjoy."

"My second book is called Angle of Yaw. It’s concerned, roughly speaking, with the commercialization of public space and speech. I’m also interested in the ways that technologies of viewing — aerial photography in particular — replace the God-term with a camera that feeds our spectacular culture an image of itself. This is, of course, a famous idea. The air war, the flight simulator, the crop circle, space travel, the marching band forming a flag at halftime for the omniscient Goodyear blimp — such ideologically rich phenomena recur throughout the book. Maybe their recurrence imposes an order on the poems ironically homologous to the cosmetic order such forms aspire to impose on us? Images bundled into experience, fascia... Anyway, if there is innovation in the book, it’s not primarily philosophical."

"A lot of the most beautiful moments in the arts do come at the breaking point of the medium. Sometimes the most moving moment when someone is speaking or singing is when their voice cracks with emotion or they can't go on.

"When someone reaches the limit of the power of the medium, that's when they start to signify this thing that exceeds the medium. It's a way of making us feel what's not sayable, what's inexpressible. That's how you say what can't be said."

"It was Rich’s voice—analytic, passionate, radical, ferocious, yet never merely fervent—that I wanted to hear in the midst of today’s tedious and all too familiar debates about women’s rights. Rich’s death leaves a hole in the culture that can’t be easily filled. The generation of feminist intellectuals who helped usher in the changed world we live in will soon be gone; there’s something lonely about that, I think. To be reminded of just how much the world has changed since Rich’s youth, you might reread Robert Lowell’s (very nice) review of her fourth book in the New York Times, which aptly but rather awfully describes reading her work as “watching the terrible and only abstractly imaginable struggle of a beetle to get out of its beetle shell while remaining a beetle.” In those days, she was what they called a “woman poet.”"

"Ariana Reines, now thirty, has a curriculum vitae that could make her look like a star of academia. She graduated summa cum laude from Barnard and then studied with the most rarefied, radical philosophers and literary theorists at Columbia and at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She has translated two books from the French for Semiotext(e), as well as Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare for her own tiny Mal-O-Mar press. She was the 2009 Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry (the youngest ever) at UC Berkeley. Her first book of poems was The Cow (2006), followed by the two reviewed here, and she’s the author of a play, TELEPHONE (inspired by Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book’s extravagantly difficult, graphic extrapolation from telephone technology into schizophrenia and culture), the production of which play awed reviewers and won two Obies in 2009. Reines is interested in and has studied performance, and is an irresistible, waifish, wisecracking public impresario of her poems. She’s discussed endlessly on the Web. Whatever all that might suggest, her heart truly is in the gutter with the filthy and distraught and impossible and she’s one notch above a bag lady herself, literally. She is about nothing but poetry—poetry and decency (though possibly in that order)."

Ben Lerner and Cyrus Console grew up together in Topeka, Kansas, and became poets. Here the two friends discuss their boyhood bedsheets, corn and irony, fundamentalism and pharmaceuticals, how they came to use words like “metonymic,” “horizontality,” and “syntagmatic,” and why they are in the habit of renouncing poetry.

Mercury is a book, a book composed of five books. I labored over its structure like an animal. I must have made thirty drafts. There is a metabook over the book, which is the book made of its images. The book is backwards, standing on its baby’s head. There are lots of books in there. Discreet entities that eventually coalesce could be the case, yeah. The structure is the most important thing about the book. The structure is its justice. I want it almost to feel like water tinged with – faint hint of something – I want it to be readable like that, so easy that you just drink the water, this “tortured water” as Thomas Vaughan rather allegorically describes the substance of mercury, and find it has just enough particularity to relieve you of yourself, and just enough transparency to pass yourself through it, and just enough shine to sting you with yourself, bring you into a heightened state of consciousness.

Walt Whitman, ultimately revered as “America’s Bard,” began his career as an obscure newspaperman. In 1855, seeking to expand his audience, he mailed his self-published collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who replied with a laudatory note. Emerson was dismayed to discover that Whitman went on to publish the note in several newspapers, as well as having it printed up in a new edition of Leaves of Grass. But Emerson’s tribute notwithstanding, the book was met with widespread indifference.

Established in 1998, GOSS183::CASA MENENDEZ (formerly known as Menendez Publishing) and founded by Didi Menendez publishes poetry books and the literary journals OCHO, MiPOesias Magazine, plus Poets and Artists, which also features visual works by contemporary artists. Poems that have first appeared in OCHO and MiPOesias have been included in the anthologies of the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Menendez is also the creator of miPOradio, (“where poetry tunes in”).

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Kobayashi Issa (小林 一茶?, June 15, 1763 - November 19, 1827),[1] was a Japanese poet and lay Buddhist priest of the Jōdo Shinshū sect known for his haiku poems and journals. He is better known as simply Issa (一茶?), a pen name meaning Cup-of-tea[2] (lit. "one [cup of] tea"). He is regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashō, Buson and Shiki - 'the Great Four, Basho, Buson, Issa, Shiki'.[3]

But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.
We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.

Why is fusion in confusion?
Why isn’t dance in coincidence?
Why is tic in didactic?
Why is Go in God?
Why is us in Jesus?
Why is Try in Poetry?

The elephants ate each other then they dreamed
of eating elephants till their captors came
to feed them. Then they died. My meth lab
tends to explode. I move to a new one
like a hermit crab. I give the gift of gab.

The truth gets me hard. Song selection
is key. The idiot Swedes do a number on me.
They invent refrigeration and sleep in shifts.
I’m tired of being compared to Britney Spears.
She’s so pretty. I’m covered in petroglyphs.

That sorcerer bewitched my penis!
I’m speed and space, an Aztec princess.
The truth makes me hurl, the truth’s a mistake.
John Milton jumps out of my birthday cake.

The psyched Mohican oils the beaver.
Fruit Stripe gum soon loses flavor.
Everything’s flammable. Everything’s flash.
Postmen like doctors and doctors like cash.

Girls who are unfaithful and at the same time relentlessly honest

Stephanie Anderson, Michael Robbins, and Anthony Madrid.

Most of the poems I write begin with a simple word or idea. I’ll be drinking coffee and think “I like coffee!” and then I’ll start writing about how much I like coffee. It sounds pretty basic, I know. I suppose it’s the “like” that moves me to begin writing a poem—some sort of celebration in my chest wanting some words to understand itself, some sort of grief needing a body.

It is by now a cliché to classify a writer as unclassifiable, but 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellow Peter Cole is importantly difficult to place. I think he’s an American poet, but I’m not entirely sure; since 1980, he has lived primarily in Jerusalem. I consider him an experimental writer, but his work is as formally indebted to medieval Hebrew poets as it is to postwar American poetries. He is a Jewish poet, certainly, but above all in his ceaseless questioning of what such a phrase might mean: “Israel is he, or she, who wrestles / with God—call him what you will / not some goon (with a rabbi and a gun) / in a pre-fab home on a biblical hill.” The sheer scale of his accomplishment as a translator makes him an outlier: he’s translated widely from modern Hebrew and Arabic, and in The Dream of the Poem, an anthology of Hebrew poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain between the years 950 and 1492, he brings the verse of five centuries into English with deep scholarship and the lightest touch. And his own poetry is perhaps most remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off—the affective range is wide and the forms restless. From his home on the seam between East and West Jerusalem, Peter fielded questions about translation and his new book of poems, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled.