Articles

Showing 1-20 of 149 articles
  • Interview

    An Ever-Bigger Table

    By James D. Sullivan
    To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Poetry Center, and to mark the opening of the Poetry Foundation's latest exhibition, “A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center,“ on view...
    A close-up photograph of a wall of colorful poetry broadsides.
  • Interview

    Following the Impulse of the Brush

    By Arthur Sze
    I met Kimiko Hahn in the early 1980s when Jessica Hagedorn invited us to read in a series she curated at Basement Workshop in New York City’s Chinatown. I was immediately struck by Kimiko’s poise...
    A portrait of Kimiko Hahn in profile.
  • Interview

    All Sorts of Secret Treasure

    By Rachel Kolb
    In John Lee Clark’s hands, all language becomes a verb: relentless, unfolding, born from bodies and their varied interactions with each other. To converse with Clark is to examine how we think and...
    An illustration of a man in a blue shirt speaking with his hands while two other hands, made of yarn, drape over his hands in the listening position for tactile communication. The background is blue knitwork.
  • Interview

    Having Their Say

    By Lily Meyer
    In May 2018, at what seems in hindsight like the hopeful peak of the #MeToo movement—Bill Cosby had just been convicted of sex crimes; Harvey Weinstein was about to turn himself in—the classicist...
    A portrait of Stephanie McCarter, a blonde woman in a black top and gold, pendant earrings.
  • Interview

    Never Static

    By Jenna Peng
    Editor’s Note: A condensed version of this interview appears in the November 2022 issue of Poetry. Will Alexander is everything. I say that colloquially but mean it metaphysically. He’s a poet and a philosopher...
    A black-and-white portrait of Will Alexander in a baseball hat and a striped shirt.
  • Interview

    Walking in an Empire

    By Amaud Jamaul Johnson
    A child was murdered. This particular version of heartache is very old. It’s also so common now that such news washes over us. But fires have been set, and wars fought, for lesser grievances. It’...
    A portrait of Courtney Faye Taylor sitting in a sunlit room, surrounded by plants.
  • Interview

    She Really Enjoyed Him

    By Garrett Caples
    At 76, Alice Notley is a formidable figure in contemporary poetry, having emerged from one of the most celebrated American avant-gardes of the late 20th century, the New York School, only to forge...
    Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan together.
  • Interview

    Histories of the Future Frontier

    By J. Howard Rosier
    The classic Black adage—that we must work twice as hard to be successful—becomes doubly perilous when one tacks on the operative phrase at living. These are the existential stakes underlying Golden Ax (Penguin...
    Portrait of Rio Cortez looking into the camera. She wears glasses, a gold necklace, and a leather jacket.
  • Interview

    Positive Rigor

    By Rowan Ricardo Phillips
    Adrian Matejka was recently named the new editor of Poetry, the 12th person to hold that title since the magazine began in 1912, and the first Black top editor in the magazine’s history. However, his professional...
    A headshot of Adrian Matejka looking into the camera, wearing a dark blazer, a sweater, and a necklace.
  • Interview

    Small Maneuvers and Big Effects

    By Kevin O'Rourke
    When Garrett Caples’s third collection, Power Ballads, was released in 2016, his publisher, Wave Books, described it as “bizarre and hilarious, in which Dylan and Bowie sit alongside the French surrealists...
    Graffiti-style font of the word lovers against a white backdrop.
  • Interview

    The Job of a Poet Is to Witness

    By Saeed Jones
    In contemporary American poetry, all roads lead to Patricia Smith. Look, maybe some of y’all are content with unproductive detours, lyric byways, and formal parking lots, but I’m a writer and a reader...
    Headshot of Patricia Smith looking into the camera.
  • Interview

    Starting From the Middle

    By Lily Meyer
    In 2018, I went to a reading at the Library of Congress featuring five poets laureate from across the country, which remains the best poetry event I have ever attended. All five poets were beautiful...
    Portrait of Adrian Matejka standing outside.
  • Interview

    On the Road With Bruno K. Öijer

    By Johannes Göransson
    Editor’s Note: This spring, Action Books published Swedish poet Bruno K. Öijer's The Trilogy, co-translated by Öijer and Victoria Häggblom. To mark the occasion, Action Books editor Johannes Göransson interviewed Öijer about the poet’s experiences...
    Black-and-white portrait of poet Bruno K. Öijer leaning against a vintage car in a redwood forest.
  • Interview

    Moments Like Tiny Razors

    By Kathleen Rooney
    Zoë Hitzig leads a double life. She’s a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University, where she has written papers on economists’ roles in redesigning public school allocation algorithms and ...
    Portrait of Zoe Hitzig.
  • Interview

    Wild Girl Poet

    By Sally Wen Mao
    Back when we were still going to parties, I met Marilyn Chin at a party. It was 2013, at a gathering for Kundiman, the Asian American poetry collective. Jane Wong and I were munching on plates of...
    Portrait of Marilyn Chin.
  • Interview

    Poetry From Below

    By Phil Christman
    Mark Nowak worked at Wendy’s for most of the 1980s. He is the author of three books of poetry—Revenants (2000), Shut Up Shut Down (2004), and Coal Mountain Elementary (2009, with photos by Ian Teh). He used to play in...
    Black-and-white portrait of Mark Nowak.
  • Interview

    Country Kink

    By Rachel Rabbit White
    In I Live in the Country & other dirty poems (Four Way Books, 2020), the fifth collection by Arielle Greenberg, pleasure is out in the open. The setting is the idyllic countryside, with its animals, its rain...
    Portrait of Arielle Greenberg sitting outside.
  • Interview

    Make it New, Again

    By Lily Meyer
    Like many writers, the British poet Hannah Sullivan is also a literature professor. In her academic life, she studies literary innovation and revision and the ways in which other poets strive toward...
    Portrait of Hannah Sullivan.
  • Interview

    Fun With Doom

    By Kathleen Rooney
    “More than anything, I want / the ability to respond perfectly / to tragedy—,” Paige Lewis writes in Space Struck (Sarabande, 2019), their wise and witty debut collection. In some sense, the book does exactly that. ...
    Portrait of Paige Lewis outdoors in the sunlight.
  • Interview

    Homesick for an Imagined Place

    By Amy Lam
    About halfway through Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Aria Aber’s debut poetry collection, there is this section epigraph: “Lass dir alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken.” It’s a line ...
    Photo of poet Aria Aber on a bus
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