Essays
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
Untranslatable Song: The Vertical Poetry of Roberto Juarroz
By Wally Swist
“For a poet who is also considered to be an aphorist, and who was a friend and colleague of Antonio Porchia, a master of the form, the poetry of Juarroz is more substantive than what is an oversimplification of his style and form.”
Best of Impossible Worlds: Miriam Sagan’s and Tom Laichas’ Poetry of Place
By Toti O’Brien
I have acquainted Miriam Sagan and Tom Laichas through individual poems found in journals and magazines—chance encounters that have urged me to look for more.
How to Tell a True Origin Story of a Novel
By Nina Schuyler
“My novel is about a female mathematician, Virginia, who uses artificial intelligence to bring back her dead lover. The two anecdotes I just told you might seem like the origin story of my novel. If someone tells you an origin story like this, don’t believe it.”
Hidden Mischief: Some Thoughts on Tate and Edson
By Robin Arble
“The mischief in Tate and Edson’s poems plays with form as much as content. Already bored with the subversion inherent in the ‘the prose poem’—an oxymoron, a floating stone—their poems straddle the line between verse and prose.”
Notes on a Poem: Nathan McClain’s Labor Day: Brighton Beach
By Robin Arble
“Nathan is skeptical of the prose poem because he thinks, like many, but not all poets, that the line break is a fundamental element of successful poetry, and any poem that abandons the line break must replace it with something that succeeds in doing everything the line break does.”
This Powerful Rhyme: A Helplessly Wandering Essay on a Willfully Meandering Poem
By Art Beck
In our neo-Orwellian world, is it adage, cliche’, or just hypothesis to say “the pen is mightier than the sword”? Does “the pen” equate with “the truth”? Or, since we’re talking about sword fights, aren’t the feints and parries of “alternative facts” every bit as much a weaponized pen as the sincerity of a straightforward lunge?
The Power of Three: Some Martial “Triptychs”
By Art Beck
The 1st Century Roman epigrammatist Martial left us some 1500 extant poems. Classical scholars will sometimes produce monographs on the complementary makeup of one or another of his volumes, but “poetic” translators generally make their selection across Martial’s entire works, often based on a particular translator’s sense of compatibility with various individual poems.
Essay: How Not to Review a Translation
By Art Beck
Recently someone sent me a PEN America YouTube discussion on reviewing translations. The panelists were practicing translators, trade publishers, and reviewers from respected journals. It was, in many ways, a conversation on how to balance various interests.
Letter from Singapore
By Ho Lin
In Asia, most cities jolt to life at night, and Singapore is no exception. For one thing, it’s usually too damn hot to do anything during the day, except hit one of the public pools (until the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm hits).
A Hieronymus Litany: An essay on St. Jerome’s Epistles
By Art Beck
I. For the Love of God, Jerome?
Somewhere on the internet—I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten where or whose poem it was—I came across a poem that began with a Latin epigraph: Amor ordinem nescit.
On Light Noise as Translation
By Karen An-hwei Lee
Several years ago, a friend gave me a gift subscription to a magazine that sent, in turn, a sequence of maps—a bird migration map, a global warming map, a seas-of-the-world map, a night-sky atlas, and a map of the globe at night.
Preface to S O S: Poems, 1961-2013 by Amiri Baraka
By Paul Vangelisti
S O S traces the almost sixty-year career of a writer who may be, along with Ezra Pound, one of the most important and least understood American poets of the past century. The selection attests to a life’s work that is both a body a poetry and a body of knowledge; passionate, often self-critical reflections on the culture and politics of his time.