Poetry

‘The Roots of Our Madness’

John Berryman was central to American poetry’s personal turn, yet his Dream Songs made the racialization of that turn—and the whiteness of the lyric tradition—explicit.

April 8, 2021 issue

Ben Lerner

Past Imperfect

Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock is eerily appropriate for a time when a pandemic has suspended the normal temporal rhythms for so many of us, while laying bare our mortally uneven relationship to those rhythms.

February 25, 2021 issue

Evan Kindley

To Err Is Poetic

The poetry canon is dotted with mistakes large and small; why do some critics seem attached to reading these errors as intentional?

February 11, 2021 issue

Jed Perl

Cubism’s Poet

Writer, painter, and a close friend of Picasso, Max Jacob was part of the glory of interwar bohemian Paris.

February 25, 2021 issue

Louise Glück

The Poet and the Reader: Nobel Lecture 2020

January 14, 2021 issue

Clair Wills

Learning to Grieve

A poet and a psychologist consider the necessity of mourning our dead.

November 19, 2020 issue

Landscape painting, Tang dynasty era (618–907)

Madeleine Thien

Poems Without an ‘I’

In Chinese poetry, fiction, and philosophy, the “I” is not the nerve center from which thought and knowledge begin.

October 8, 2020 issue

Ange Mlinko

‘The Splendour and the Sting’

The passionate voices and formal experiments of two poets who should no longer be neglected.

December 17, 2020 issue

The Latest

Whitney Cox

Lovesick for a God

A new translation of the Tiruvāymoli vividly reveals the inner life of a devotee enraptured by Vishnu’s presence and made desperate by his absence.

May 27, 2021 issue

Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

Santiago de Compostela

a poem

May 27, 2021 issue

Rae Armantrout

a poem

May 27, 2021 issue

John Ashbery

From The History of Photography (1993)

a poem

May 13, 2021 issue