The Wilde Boys Read Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop in 1954. Elizabeth Bishop only published about one hundred poems during her lifetime, but these days, it’s possible to know more about Bishop than ever before. Last month saw the...
View ArticleOn the Shelf
A cultural news roundup. RIP Josef Skvorecky. The Adequate Gatsby. Jay Caulfield? Actors Anonymous. The strange mystery of Michiko Kakutani’s Twitter. The strange experience of eating with Marianne...
View ArticleA Snail’s Pace
Edward Lear, self-portrait as snail. When John Ashbery reviewed Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems in 1969 for The New York Times, his review was accompanied by an illustration: two giant snails...
View ArticleHouse of Poesy: At the Grolier Poetry Book Shop
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is both a misnomer and an anomaly. It has long dedicated itself to the task of promoting the reading and writing of poetry and has, for...
View ArticleNatural History: Adalbert Stifter
Statute of Stifter, Linz. My literary hero, Adalbert Stifter, was introduced to me by a professor of German studies during my sophomore year at Binghamton University. At the time, I lived alone in a...
View ArticleToo Good to Succeed
Very often you have to be a lone nut to come up with a really original idea.… People are very insular … even [in] a great city like New York … people are like fish swimming around in aquariums and all...
View ArticleThe Allure of the Roller Rink, and Other News
Photo: GuillaumeG, via Wikimedia Commons Marianne Moore’s strange, sad childhood: “Mary [her mother] established a pattern whereby Marianne, in family conversations and correspondence, was invariably...
View ArticleI Have Wasted My Life
Niels Frederik Schiøttz-Jensen, An Afternoon’s Rest, 1885The narrator of “Yancey,” Ann Beattie’s story in our new Summer issue, is an aging poet; she tells of her encounter with an IRS agent who shows...
View ArticleStaff Picks: A Mongoose Civique and a Maestro of the Rant
Love Wins: Stephen Andrew Hiltner, our senior editor, designed this collage in honor of today’s Supreme Court decision.“Writing religious poetry in the twentieth century is very difficult.” So says...
View ArticleLet’s Do Some Fictional Drugs, and Other News
Possible side effects include double lives.The drugs in the real world are okay. But fictional drugs—those are some drugs. A tour of drugs in fiction suggests, among other things, that we’ve been...
View ArticleYour Every Wish for a Home, and Other News
The cover of a Cinderella Homes sales brochure, 1955–1957. From Barbara Miller Lane’s Houses for a New World. Via The New York Review of Books.Did you know? Heterosexual men tend to enjoy sexual...
View ArticleGeorge Plimpton on Muhammad Ali, the Poet
In the clip above, our founding editor George Plimpton recalls hearing Muhammad Ali give a lecture to thousands of Harvard graduates, and the poem that emerged from it:He gave this wonderful speech …...
View ArticleWe’re Both Dippy Over Him, and Other News
Gee whiz!If you’ve been listening to pop music your whole life, you might think that love is a many-splendored thing, subject to the vicissitudes and vagaries of the human condition. You would be...
View ArticleGarbage Connector
How the Brooklyn Bridge became a living landfill.Photo: Brooklyn Daily Eagle/Mary Frost.I too saw the satin ribbons, the scrunchies, the clothing tags, the fat knots of underwear and panty hose, had my...
View ArticleWe’ll Always Have Barf Bags, and Other News
The barf bag: a comforting cultural constant. These days, it often seems the world has tilted on its axis: nothing is the same, we’ve broken with the past, there’s no going back. But we’ve still got...
View ArticleFive Complaints
(Containing sundrie small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie.) 1. Suppose you want to know whether a given Czesław Miłosz poem rhymes in the original. Or you want to know if it’s in meter. If you don’t...
View ArticleWhy Write Limericks for John Ashbery
“For me, Ashbery was the sky.” I was with some poetry friends in a pub near Holborn, shooting the breeze before a reading two of us were participating in. The breeze was fairly dark on that day, for...
View ArticleThe Insouciant Sentence
In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence each week. Artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven...
View ArticlePoetry Rx: Lie to Yourself, What You Will Lose Is Yourself
In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh...
View ArticleLet’s Do Some Fictional Drugs, and Other News
Possible side effects include double lives. The drugs in the real world are okay. But fictional drugs—those are some drugs. A tour of drugs in fiction suggests, among other things, that we’ve been...
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