On Writing a Poetry of Expansiveness
This interview is an edited collation of e-mail exchanges and a one-hour telephone conversation that occurred late last year.
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Two Poets’ Lives Re-envisioned
Review of two books of poetry: The Secret Dublin Diary of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Robert Waldron and The More I Owe You by Michael Sledge.
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Love Poems of WWII
Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master collects a number of poems from [his] early books, along with a selection from Thompson’s later, posthumously published works, to yield a folio of over forty pages of his poetry.
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A Poet’s Epilogue
A Martian Muse contains 25 of Shepherd’s final essays, ranging across several categories, with titles that include “Poetics and Poetry,” “Art and Society,” “Artistic Production,” “Intention, Aspiration, Inspiration,” and “Illness, Identity, and Poetry.”
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How Whitman Seduced Us with a Photograph
TO WHAT EXTENT did Walt Whitman consciously pitch his books to men who were attracted to other men? We know that he carefully crafted his public persona in general, right down to writing pseudonymous reviews and letters that praised his books but also focused on his character and appearance.
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Ashbery: Poet of Perception
Ashbery’s latest collection, Planisphere (2009), is dedicated to David Kermani, his partner of 35 years. They met in 1970, when Ashbery was 42 and Kermani was 23. The new book demonstrates that the poet is still hot to trot …
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A New Cavafy Is Born
Reviews of C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, and C. P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of Stray Dog Winter, Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems, and Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film; Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever; Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited; and The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems, 1969 – 2007.
MorePoet of the Cinéma
WHILE COCTEAU IS perhaps best known to Americans for two of the movies he wrote and directed- La belle et la bête (1946) and Orpheus (1949), which figure on most short lists of great French films-he started as a poet and always saw himself as such.
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