"I have never done any teaching. I don't think I know enough about anything to do any teaching. I've done all sorts of odd jobs. My weirdest was raking up gold dust off the floor when I was messenger in a gold place on 47th Street. We had to do it with a broom like in Grimm's fairy tales, and sort the gold dust out of the ordinary dirt. I only lasted there about three weeks. Then I did things like being a waitress, and odd jobs all the time."

The poet-critic gets no sympathy, and considering the charge-sheet against him — adversarial, addicted to dicta, motivated by an axe-grindingly acute sense of right and wrong — why would he? He is, in most eyes, a hyphenated hothead. Until recently, however, that hyphen was still a badge of special authority, so that practitioners writing critically about their craft were regarded as poetry’s ideal readers. Not everyone agreed (Northrop Frye thought poets made bad critics because they were too obsessed by their own processes), but Alfred Kazin summed up the standard view in 1967 when, with considerable professional envy, he described the poet-critic as always “right in the middle of the parade (and if he is good enough, he will be leading it).”

"Talk of poetry as communication worries poets and critics for a variety of reasons, some good, some not. Those who view language itself as essentially suspect will see that definition as either naive or deceptive."

When asked about why her poems look the way they do ("The Violinist at the Window, 1918," from the March 2008 question-and-answer issue of Poetry in particular, which we had to print on a fold-out page), Jorie Graham remarked that she is "working with lines that acquire momentum as they move down the page, yet need to carry that momentum across shifting distances of breath and attention."

Night is more complicated than day, it is the home of dreams, sleep, shadowy eroticism.

This rose is a rose and its mirror image—eight petalled. Above and below the two heads glow, larger, translucent. Together, they form a hexoctahedron—that is, if you were to cut out the two ‘roses’ and fold them in triangular facets you would make a 48 faceted solid of eight irregular ‘planes’ composed of six facets.

“We live at a time in which 'modern' no longer makes clear what differentiates the present from the past. Comes instead the prefix 'post-,' illuminating like a metaphysical truth an age that never did, perhaps, exist, signifying above all our wish to be rid of words that no longer help us speak.”

"In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes, there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls."

When's the last time you looked up the word "dictionary" in the dictionary?

I guess that'd be slightly like looking into a mirrorful of mirrors, but on reading Ange Mlinko's review of new books of poems in the January issue of Poetry , I thought it might be helpful; as she writes, "Rare it is to find such a neat convergence in the dead center of two new collections: both Mary Kinzie's California Sorrow and Robert Pinsky's Gulf Music intersect at the poet's oracle, the dictionary." What poet doesn't love an oracle?

What's your favorite rhyme ever? Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Cole Porter...It's a one-way question, she said, so don't answer, what's yours?

I guess the best questions are impossible to answer.

Give me the impossible.

Jordan Davis (thank you, Jordan!) made the connection for me: Patrizia Cavalli, whose poems are featured in the Italian Poetry Portfolio in the December issue of Poetry is the title character of Kenneth Koch's poem, "Talking to Patrizia," first seen in One Train and reprinted recently in Collected Poems. What did she tell Koch?

"The degree to which rejection of traditional forms was part of the renewal of poetry of the twentieth century varied, of course, from country to country. In England it was never as pronounced as in the United States. And Reginald Gibbons once observed that 'the modern avant-garde in Spain,' by comparison with their American counterparts, 'felt little need to rebel against the traditions of poetic form.' In Italy, the various avant-gardes of the twentieth century, from the futuristi to the novissimi and beyond, certainly did rebel against Italian formal traditions. But it seems to me that they somehow managed to open up new rhetorical and prosodic possibilities without causing Italian poetry to develop as many neuroses about form as American poetry has - a nice trick."

The poems of Elfriede Jelinek published in the November issue of Poetry (translated by Michael Hofmann) are her first to appear in English. But, as Hofmann notes, her literary career began with poetry; her first publication was a collection of poems, Lisas Schatten, in 1967, at age twenty-one. She is better known for her fifteen stage plays and eleven novels (five of which are now available in English translation), including the widely regarded (and heavily autobiographical) Der Klavierspielerin, or The Piano Teacher, adapted into a 2001 film by fellow Austrian Michael Haneke, starring Isabelle Huppert.

The distinguished man on the right is Charles Henry Rowell, one of the deans of American letters. Do not let the John Lennon glasses fool you; he's an old-style, southern aristocrat with a passionate love for African-American visual and literary art. This is evidenced by his 30 year tenure as the founding editor of Callaloo, "the premier journal of art, literature and culture of the African Diaspora, which publishes original works by and critical studies of black writers worldwide. The journal offers a rich mixture of fiction, poetry, plays, critical essays, cultural studies, interviews, photography, and visual art."

Late last year, Federal agents raided six Swift & Co. meat processing plants in six states in search of illegal immigrants working there. 1,282 people were arrested in Operation Wagon Train.

"About twenty minutes after sending my e-mail of acceptance I paused to triumphantly sharpen my claws on the bookcase when I noticed the blazing, neon writing on the wall. It said: YOU’VE NEVER EVEN PASSED ENGLISH AND EVERYONE WHO READS THIS MAGAZINE WILL KNOW IT."

At birth, before the umbilical was cut, Ralph Steadman pooped in the hand of the hospital nurse. This marked, according to Steadman, the “earliest manifestation of a Gonzotic event.” He claims to have sole understanding of Gonzo, a term taken from an astonished medical student, Giuseppe Gonzaga, who witnessed the immaculate crap and shouted, “Biologico impossible! Mama mia! Gonzo puro!” Steadman figures, “Pure shit.”

You may have seen the news items here and there about Anne Stevenson’s having just received the Poetry Foundation’s “Neglected Masters” award, which honors a significant but under-recognized American poet. It’s incredible to think that when the Library of America publishes her selected poems next spring it will be her first book of poems to appear in the United States for over two decades.

New York School poet, artist, and art-historian David Shapiro was in town for a reading and lecture, and wanted to pay a visit to the Poetry office. Partly, he was just curious, having wanted to see Harriet's haunts since he was a boy - Shapiro started publishing poems just into his teens, having been mentored by the late Kenneth Koch - and was first in the magazine way back in 1966.

I wrote a comment in response to Simon DeDeo's response to Don Share's post below. It dovetails with Rigoberto's call this week for more reviewing.

I don't disagree with Rigoberto. As an author, I loved getting reviews. As a critic, I like reading them, especially if the reviewer has style. But what's in it for the reviewer? If everything you write is positive, you're seen as merely a booster. If you write anything negative, you'll isolate yourself. Just to assume the critical distance, the authoritative mien of the reviewer, will isolate you.

These letters to Poetry magazine include valuable information by Eavan Boland, Mary Kinzie, Brian Phillips, Peter Campion, and our very own Emily Warn on what it means to review. I won't try to paraphrase their considered judgments here.

"When I say, then, that the current audience for poetry in America lacks taste, I do not mean to suggest that we have bad taste--that we like bad poems. I mean, instead, that we have fallen into a kind of insensiblity, a sort of intelligent numbness, which is both a cause and a consequence of the poetry culture's lingering anxiety."

I’m still on my mission to convince readers of poetry to try their hand at reviewing a book of poetry at least once! It amazes me how when poets publish a book they hold their breaths awaiting critical responses, and then become disgruntled or depressed when no one else gets off their behinds to review a book. The culture of passivity needs to change, and there’s one good way to do it: the Internet.

"Poetry is so much a part of people's lives that crowds often assemble in the villages around a narrator who recites and interprets the epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and who has survived the impact of the printing press and cinema. Such a recitation may take a few weeks." —Tambimuttu, Poetry, January 1959

In 1954, while in India on a lecture tour, Poetry editor Karl Shapiro began to collect materials for a special issue of the magazine featuring contemporary Indian poets. Fifty years later the magazine returns with the September 2007 Indian Poetry Portfolio.

You'll find in the September issue of Poetry a very lively debate about Michael Hofmann's review of the new Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert. His piece, "A Dead Necktie" (which we ran in May), dismissed the new translations, and the seven letters we've published this month are just the tip of the proverbial and metaphorical iceberg. One of the letters is up right now on the Poetry website; all are passionate and make good points. Among the issues raised: what constitutes competence in translators... and in reviewers of their work? Do great poets deserve many translators - or, as Hofmann said, not. In what sense is a translated poem the same poem as the original? All represent what one letter-writer calls "strong beliefs about what makes good poetry." The debate continues...