An item in the New York Times on November 19 brought our attention to the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest at Columbia University. The contest is named for the famed author of the 12-line poem “Trees,” first published in 1913: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a…
Bernie Taupin’s lyrics make him whole.
The young poets who stand out have helped make race and sexuality and gender the red-hot centers of current poetry, and they push past as many boundaries as they can. They strain to think anew about selfhood and group membership. Drawing on eclectic traditions, they mine the complexity latent in…
In early July, the Nation magazine published a 14-line poem, “How-To,” by Anders Carlson-Wee. The Scrapbook holds rather old-school opinions on the matter of poetic form, and we found it hard to scan “How-To.” Still, the poem’s language is incisive, it has a distinctive rhythm, and it ends with a…
A few weeks ago I received a printed postcard in the mail, beginning “Dear Friend of Donald Hall.” In a few brief lines it announced that Don had been diagnosed with cancer, and would no longer be able to read or answer any letters.
We were saddened this week to learn of the death of Donald Hall, one of the great formalist poets to arise in the second half of the 20th century. Hall wrote scores of works. He was a talented playwright, a superb memoirist, and an omnicompetent anthologist.
Unsettled questions of Ireland’s past and hope for its literary future.
Pleasure, war, and the mad torment of Lord Byron.
A new documentary illustrates how the transracial pretender is doubling down on delusion.
Big news from the publishing world. As print journals search for ways to adapt to evolving attitudes and new technologies, the New York Times Magazine has taken a bold step. The Times Magazine has been edited since 2014 by Jake Silverstein, formerly editor of the Texas Monthly, who upon joining the…
The challenges of teaching poetry.
Next year will be the centenary of one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” I presume there’ll be suitable acknowledgment of this in literary circles, and even an occasional nod from those of us who labor in less rarefied intellectual climes. But if…
A revisionist account of the great wit’s post-prison life.
A half-century after her death, Carson McCullers is best known for The Member of the Wedding, her 1946 novel about a motherless 12-year-old girl who watches the planning for her brother’s nuptials and feels distanced from the rest of the family. Adapted for stage and screen, McCullers’s story is…
The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski was born in the ancient capital of Lvov, but cherishes no early memories of the city. Lvov was occupied by the Germans at the time of the poet’s birth. After the Red Army occupied the city at the end of World War II, Zagajewski’s family was forcibly repatriated—or…
Writing history, and especially the history of the ancient world, is an uncertain business, in which the truth is as elusive as in metaphysics. Modern historians of the classical world necessarily rely heavily on the works of the ancients. And the supreme historians among the ancient Greeks had to…
Until his death on October 14, Richard Wilbur had spent nearly half a century as America’s greatest living poet. A writer of opulent forms and playful wit, whose rhymed and measured stanzas combined the intellectual complexities of modernist verse with the familiar pleasures of an older tradition,…
Remembering Pulitzer-winning poet John Ashbery, last of the New York school.
The publication of a new translation of the Aeneid by poet David Ferry at the age of 93 is an outstanding achievement. Having also translated Virgil’s other masterpieces, the Eclogues and Georgics, Ferry has spent two decades in the company of this great Roman poet.
To read the second and final stanza of Catherine Chandler’s “Chasubles”—“Summer’s a smiling charlatan / camouflaged in green / where violet truths lie mantled in / the seen and the unseen”—one might think American religious poetry is now much as it was in Emily Dickinson’s day. The reclusive maid…
An America thoroughly fed up with both politics and political correctness slogs through a surreally dirty, bizarre, and finally insane election season—and, when the dust settles, finds itself in the grip of Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin.
An America thoroughly fed up with both politics and political correctness slogs through a surreally dirty, bizarre, and finally insane election season—and, when the dust settles, finds itself in the grip of Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin.
When Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appeared in print, in 1839, its wintry world of Christian revelry, chivalric honor, and Arthurian romance had long since vanished. Indeed, that world, or rather, medieval romantic literature as a whole, was antiquated even at the time the poem was written,…
When Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appeared in print, in 1839, its wintry world of Christian revelry, chivalric honor, and Arthurian romance had long since vanished. Indeed, that world, or rather, medieval romantic literature as a whole, was antiquated even at the time the poem was written,…
At the beginning of the year, just in time for the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, Boston Review published a poetry chapbook called Poems for Political Disaster. Collecting works by 36 poets, nearly all of which are published there for the first time, the book is a chance, according to…
When Weldon Kees disappeared, at the age of 41, he seemed on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent American poets of his generation. He had three collections to his name, and his work had been published in such periodicals as Sewanee Review, Poetry, Harper's, and the New Yorker. But on…
The sonnet is an architectural fixture as germane to Western thought as the flying buttress, and one nearly as old. Poems of 14 lines, metered and rhymed, came into vogue in 13th-century Tuscany and never quite left the scene. Indeed, sonnets and flowing robes are about the only things in common…
Thomas Hardy died in 1928 and immediately precipitated a most tangled crisis, namely, how and where to inter him. Hardy’s will specified that he wished to be buried in Stinsford churchyard in his native Dorset; but influential London literary friends pushed for a public ceremony and burial in the…
New York
New York
O Festivus! O Festivus! Brighten up the most depressed of us!
Over seven decades, Helen Pinkerton has published a small number of poems admirable for their austere intellectual beauty, such as the newly collected "Metaphysical Song."
Over seven decades, Helen Pinkerton has published a small number of poems admirable for their austere intellectual beauty, such as the newly collected “Metaphysical Song."
This week, Bob Dylan finally gave the Nobel people an answer to their offer of the Literature Prize—he's happy to accept, but he's afraid he's too busy to go pick it up. Everyone's having a good chuckle at that. Nonetheless, the Nobel Prize-committee has explained that declining to accept in person…
Walter! Thou shouldst be living at this hour—
Half of Wyatt Prunty’s ninth volume of poetry consists of “Nod,” a dream-vision narrative set mostly in the darkness of a shopping mall parking lot in Atlanta. Standing there, a man, who refers to himself as Fulton, though “of course there was no Fulton,” finds himself in an age so mired in…
Fellow poets and lovers of poetry, take heart—our art is relevant again! Though not necessarily for the right reasons.
One can’t do justice in a short space to the late Robert Conquest’s gifts as a poet. But The Scrapbook can offer Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz’s assessment, which was no exaggeration:
‘I envy the mind hiding in her words,” Mary McCarthy opined of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), a poet admired for her air of secrecy during the heyday of confessionalism, when poets regularly hauled their Freudian couches into the amphitheater. Bishop’s poems, in contrast, invoke textured scenes and…
In malls today it is inhuman
"Poetry is a window into the soul. And one lesson to me from the reaction to my ‘When Whites Just Don’t Get It’ series is that we need soul-searching about race in America. So I invited readers this month to submit poems about race. Thanks to everyone for sending in more than 300 poems, and I’m…
A few hours before the ball dropped in Times Square, the Supreme Court released Chief Justice Roberts's year-end report on the federal judiciary.
Mark Strand died today at the age of 80. The Montreal-born writer, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1990-1991, was also a brilliant translator. When I was a junior editor at Ecco Press in the late 80s, Strand used to visit the editor in chief,…
David Ferry’s latest poems look at the tantalizing possibility of life after death and the existence of God. But it’s a God that the poet doesn’t know and whose name escapes him. What he does know is that he feels a presence, and poems both hide and connect him to that presence. Or, as the…
When John Betjeman was charged with helping find a proper recipient for the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1977, he contacted Philip Larkin and suggested Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), who had befriended Larkin and Kingsley Amis when they were undergraduates together at Oxford. Larkin considered…
The Open Door begins with Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” and zooms from there, highlighting 100 years of modern poetry, including that of Louise Bogan, Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, H. D., T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and…
Lover he was, unlonely, yet alone—
Just as American children grow up with Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, British children grow up with Edward Lear’s fantastical but touching poem “The Owl and the Pussycat.”
A complete understanding of Michael Robbins’s poetry requires, in roughly equal measures, knowledge of modern academic poetry, its Romantic-era predecessors, seventies and eighties pop music, recent death metal, and au courant literary criticism. Knowing more than a little about hip-hop and Star…
Barack Obama is a careful politician and a disciplined man. But when he’s on the West Coast, perhaps a little tired because of the jet lag, at a fancy fundraiser with his most glamorous and credulous supporters, he tends to let his guard down. The mask slips.
Here’s President Obama, at a fundraiser last night in Los Angeles: “[T]he American people, beneath all the pain and hurt and frustration … still want to believe that that change is possible, and there's still that hope there. … Mario Cuomo once said that campaigning is poetry and governance is…
John Keats was to Romantic poetry as James Dean was to cinema: young, gifted, and doomed. His charisma lies in the astonishing energy, humor, and inspiration that he packed into a small physical frame and an appallingly brief time frame: He died of tuberculosis aged barely 25. His eyes were always…
"Welcome to Potemkin, Iowa."
Selected Prose Works
When I was in Cambridge yesterday, a mysterious dark lady approached me in Harvard Yard. She pressed a sheet of paper into my hand, said she was a poet and a WEEKLY STANDARD reader, and asked me to share this effort, apparently based on Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," with our readers.
From the Halls of the West Wing