Poets Archives

Poets

New Books

Something about poetry—writing it, reading it, writing about reading it—begs to be postponed indefinitely. I don’t mean that I dread it, only that it calls for conditions that never quite…

The Person Who Performs

From an interview with the poet Alice Notley conducted by Janique Vigier that was scheduled to appear on the Artforum website in December. Vigier pulled the piece from publication in…

Tell It Scant

by Emily Dickinson,

From a previously unpublished letter in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, which is out next month from Harvard University Press. to unknown, late january 1878 Dear friend. We recollect you,…

The Love Feast

by Alan Jacobs,

Seeing Auden in a new light

The Beast in Me

by Allen Ginsberg,

From South American Journals, a collection of Ginsberg’s spiritual writing published last month by the University of Minnesota Press. This entry is the author’s account of an ayahuasca experience in…

An Off Pursuit

by Joan Murray,

From a draft of a letter written in 1940 by Joan Murray (1917–42) to W. H. Auden (1907–73). The letter is included in Drafts, Fragments, and Poems, a collection of…

American Expansion

by Helen Vendler,

The innovations of A.R. Ammons

Filial Poetry

by Allen Ginsberg, Louis Ginsberg, Stephen Braitman,

From an interview conducted by Stephen Braitman with Allen Ginsberg and his father, Louis Ginsberg, in 1974. The interview is included in First Thought, a collection of conversations with Allen…

The Drums of Marrakesh

by Mark McMorris,

A Jamaican-born poet chain-smokes as he listens to a circle of drummers in the old market of Marrakesh, circa 2015. The drums sound in the present, but they also sound…

Same Mistakes

by Emily Cooke,

Ted Hughes’s evasions

The Body Politic

by Emily Witt,

The battle over Pablo Neruda’s corpse.