Matthew Zapruder

...poems can be a process of unfolding, one that might welcome us, or maybe grudgingly allow us, to be inside it. Poems do not have to be all about the revelation, the learning at the end. They aren't necessarily goal-oriented. If anything they are more like a conversation with a friend. You start talking, you learn something, you double back, you get confused, you misunderstand, you laugh, you have some different feelings, you drift off...

steve fellner

...there cannot be enough good things to say about Rigoberto Gonzalez. Much to his own detriment, he has tirelessly spent time promoting marginalized authors and small presses. Not only does he write so many reviews, he has during his tenure as a member of the National Critics Circle spotlighted so many worthy poets.

Porochista Khakpour: NY Times Op-Ed

A deep dark admission: lately — and by lately I mean this era I worked so hard for, when a liberal person of color, a man who resembles my own father, would be our president — I’ve found myself thinking secretly, were certain things better in the George W. Bush era? Was it easier to be Middle Eastern then?

PSA: What's American About American Poetry?

Joshua Marie Wilkinson: If your schools of poetry keep you from dissimilar poems, your losses are legion.
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Cate Marvin: The female writer in this country confronts a constant and enduring insult: she is "equal," yet she is not recognized. There's no other way to say this: women's poetry in this country is kicking some very serious ass. So, if you ask me, Look out. I'm no gardener, but I like to think some of the strongest plants grow in the shade.
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Dante Micheaux: Being able to express my homosexuality through poetry constantly reminds me that I am American.

David Biespiel: Why Aren't Poets More Politically Active?

For sure, America's poems will go on clicking along, phrase by phrase, line by line, like some undiscovered nerve in the multi-multi-story of American life: cacophonous, diverse, unsettled, hybridized. I want to suggest that a great public will peer into the world of poetry if the poets will speak outside of the chiseled monuments of poems and distinct aesthetic debates directly to matters beyond memory, private reclamation, and linguistic chop-chop. Surely some poets are ready to escape the art's strange civic silence and enter the blunderbuss of American democracy. For too long now American poets have followed their own footsteps. They've roamed and rambled. And while poets have had their backs turned against American civic life, go figure, America has turned its back on poetry too.

Kazim Ali on Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton is known as a poet of simple and clear diction, informed by trickster sensibility, and is as facile with the cadences of King James as she is with Black vernacular.

Adrienne Rich on Elizabeth Bishop and lesbian identity

Criticism of Bishop in her lifetime was mostly appreciative of her powers of observation, her carefully articulated descriptive language, her wit, her intelligence, the individuality of her voice. I want to acknowledge the distinction of all these, the marvelous flexibility and sturdiness of her writing, her lack of self-indulgence, her capacity to write of loss and of time pat without pathos and with precision, as in poems like “Sestina,” “The Moose,” “Filling Station,” “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “At the Fishhouses.” I want to pay this homage and go on to aspects of her work which I have not yet seen discussed. In particular I am concerned with her experience of outsiderhood, closely—though not exclusively—linked with the essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity; and with how the outsider’s eye enables Bishop to perceive other kinds of outsiders and to identify, or try to identify, with them. I believe she deserves to be read and valued not only for her language and images, or for her personality within the poems, but for the way she locates herself in the world.

Originally published in the April 1983 issue of Boston Review

Kazim Ali on Jean Valentine

It’s easy to say you get lost in Jean Valentine’s poems, but you don’t. You get found.

a poetics of suspicion: Chicana/o poetry and the new

from puerto de sol:

...one must have a politically and economically viable identity in order to willingly lose it, to throw it to the wind. Those who say that for aesthetic reasons identity is dead, fragmented, or passé, often have a viable identity
they do not need to worry about. Being invisible or visible as a white male
is quite different than being invisible or visible as a Chicana/o.

J. Michael Martinez & Jordan Windholz