The Rumpus Interview with Gerald Stern
There’s a black and white photo in which the poet Stanley Kunitz lovingly holds Gerald Stern’s cheeks in both hands. It’s 1990. They’re looking into one another, and Kunitz says,…
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poetry
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Things That Work Are Muffled and Mute
Through rigorous consideration, with patient generosity, Valerio Magrelli’s poetry allows all his subjects—broken machines, utterances, each of us—to be our own streets, and in such a transfixing world, a circle…
Soften the Razor’s Edge, the Reign of Terror
Many poems, and many more lines, couplets and quatrains in Opal Sunset are superb, making their lesser companions wan imitations of what Clive James can really do when his interior…
10 Mississippi
This book is seductive because, page by page, poem by poem, 10 Mississippi is cyclic and aswirl, is… as flowing and eddying as the river of the title.
A Dialogue at the Core of Her Being
Ai successfully blends personal autobiographical poems with her trademark dramatic monologues, making for a truly original text—a kind of personified hybridity—that is both haunting and humorous.
Black Hole Sun
Ultimately, though, it's the cadence of the voice that engages the reader. Slant rhyme, and skillfully enjambed couplets and tercets, are the real shakers.
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club with Timothy Donnelly
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club talks with Timothy Donnelly about his poetry collection, The Cloud Corporation.
Pastries, Cowboy Music / That Kind of Shit
Reading, and re-reading these poems, you’ll find lines which are so outrageous, hilarious, and true that they get lodged in your head, like songs; and, you’ll find yourself quoting the…
What We Hack Up We Can Choke Down
It is Zweig’s essential Vermont-y-ness that makes her indispensable. The charm and beauty of those green mountains and isolation and mud seasons of that terrain is applied thickly in these…
Do You Have Answers For This Teacher?
I could have linked to this in Poetic Lives Online, but I feel inspired by the Chaka Khan playing in the background to open it up to the Saturday crown.…
Where I Live
Maxine Kumin’s poems about the specifics of life on the farm with family, and relationships to fish, fowl, horse and vegetable matter, not to mention lovely liquids and unappealing solids,…