Critical Poetry Review Magazine – Poetry Criticism from the Contemporary Poetry Review

Contemporary Poetry Review: Resuscitating Poetry Criticism

Contemporary Poetry Review

Great Moments in Criticism: Bierce Attacks Wilde
Ahead Was Silence: Matthew Buckley Smith on Louise Glück
Of Man & Beast: Rick Joines reviews Mark Wunderlich
Mark Bauerlein Reviews James Matthew Wilson’s Some Permanent Things
Writing the Rockies, An Invitation from David Rothman
“Revisiting Vice Versa” by Dana Gioia
Stalking the Typical Poem
James Merrill’s “The Friend of the Fourth Decade”
The Unstiflement of the Story: James Merrill’s “The Broken Home”
James Merrill: “After Greece”
“Permanence Through Words”: John Foy Reviews New Books by David Yezzi, Joanna Pearson, George Green, and Quincy R. Lehr
William Logan and the Role of the Poet-Critic
Regaining the Depths: James Merrill’s “Pearl”
James Merrill’s Geode Sonnet: Crystal Queer
The Ecstatic Discipline of David J. Rothman
“Losing the Marbles”: Merrill and Sophrosyne
Techne in Textiles: Merrill’s “Investiture at Cecconi’s’”
“A Window Fiery-Mild”: The Role of Venice in The Book of Ephraim
Satire & Dysfunction: James Merrill’s “Family Week at Oracle Ranch”
James Merrill Special Issue: An Introduction
D. H. Tracy and the Role of the Poet-Critic
Letters to CPR: Marcus Bales responds to Richard Blanco Ballyhoo
Praising Athenians in Athens: On the Failures of the American Ceremonial Poem
The Richard Blanco Debate
No Justice Done To Poetry At The Inauguration: On Richard Blanco
Dennis O’Driscoll (1954-2012): An Appreciation
Dancing In Borrowed Time: Bill Coyle on Andrew Sofer
The Man Who Killed Poetry: Joseph Epstein And His Essays
A Variety of Courage: John Foy on Gerry Cambridge’s Notes for Lighting a Fire
Thomas Hardy’s Artistry in “The Darkling Thrush”
Thomas Hardy’s “In Tenebris”: The Problem of Relativity
“The Convergence of the Twain”: Thomas Hardy and Popular Sentiment
“Effulgent” by David M. Katz (A parody)
Thomas Hardy: The Flexible Strength of “Neutral Tones”
Form as Moral Content in Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain”
The Light of Loss: Thomas Hardy’s “The Last Signal”
Introduction: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (A Special Issue)
All Messed Up: G.M. Palmer on Matthew Dickman
The Moving Scene: The Poetry of Descriptions
Joan Houlihan and the Role of the Poet-Critic
In Memoriam: Daryl Hine (1936 – 2012)
From the Archives: The Last of the Regency Dandies (1862)
CPR Remembers: Count Robert de Montesquiou
From the Archives: Beau Brummell by John Doran (1857)
From the Archives: Brummelliana by William Hazlitt (1828)
From the Archives: The Life of Beau Brummell (1864)
From the Archives: The Maxims of Pelham (1828)
The Director of Imperial Pleasures: Gaius Petronius
The First Literary Dandy: Plato
Introduction: The Literary Dandy (A Special Issue)
The Lighter Side: What Did Neruda Know?
A Claptrap Canon: On the Modern Canadian Poets Anthology by Zachariah Wells
The Lighter Side: Happy Anniversary, AWP!
The Lighter Side: How to Prepare for AWP
Monsters All the Way Down: Bill Coyle on Bruce Taylor
“Is That Really the Best You Can Do?” Quincy Lehr on Poetry and Personal Style
A Neglected Master in Our Midst: Bill Coyle on Daryl Hine
Preface: Second Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism
A Formal Feeling Comes: Anthony Hecht’s Elegaic Forms by David Rothman
Sources of Delight: What We Respond to When We Respond to Poetry by Jan Schreiber
The “I” as Great Imposter: Confession, Monologue & Persona by Joan Houlihan
Too Cool for School: G. M. Palmer on Broetry
These Are the Poems, Folks: On the Relationship Between Poetry and Joke-telling by David Yezzi
Anchor in the Shadows: Bill Coyle on Tomas Tranströmer
The Lighter Side: Quincy Lehr on Selling Your Poetry Book
Without a Net: Ernest Hilbert on Optic, Graphic, Acoustic, and Other Formations in Free Verse
Good Bone Structure: Maryann Corbett on Charles Martin
Adventures in Scholarship: Garrick Davis on the Textbook Understanding Poetry
An American Way to Go: John Foy on Peter Balakian
Rick Joines on the Gravity and Levity of Kay Ryan
The Lighter Side: The Unspoken Rules of Book Reviewing II
Crick-Crossed: Quincy Lehr on Ben Mazer
The Lighter Side: The CPR Dream Vacation House
Masterful Variations: Luke Hankins on Ashley Anna McHugh
Don Paterson’s Improbable Distances
Short Cuts: Roy Nicosia on a Post-Dementia Poet
The Lighter Side: The Unspoken Rules of Book Reviewing
The CPR Editors: We Comment on the Comments
The Lighter Side: Norman Stock Knows Our Pain
The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English
The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English (Introduction)
The Lighter Side: Why We Still Hate Poetry Readings
The Poem as Devotional Practice: Luke Hankins on the Metaphysical Poets
Short Cuts: Lewis Turco on Daniel Hoffman
The Lighter Side: Five Lessons from AWP (Or, Why We Hate Poetry Readings)
Short Cuts: Joan Houlihan on Ange Mlinko
The Hard to Get Rid Of: Jason Guriel on Recently Published Poems
Making the Angels Wince: Roy Nicosia on Frances Payne Adler
Rust on the Ideal: Andrew Goodspeed on Teresa Leo
The Well-Wrought Void: Joan Houlihan on Christian Wiman
Both Home & Away: Anthony Moore Reviews Seamus Heaney
The 2nd Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism on July 28-30, 2011
Meaningful Disorientations: Joanie Mackowski Reviews Books by Mary Jo Bang and Peter Campion
Some Problems with Modern Polish Poetry in Translation
A Polish Poet You Should Know
Telling the Broken Rosary: Notes on Narrative Verse
Learning and Teaching Taste
A Strange and Beautiful Noise: Ernest Hilbert on Late Ashbery Syndrome, or, Listening without Hearing
The Dark Pool
Poetry and the Problem of Standards
The Rest Is Criticism
Special Issue Introduction: Poetry Criticism
The Good, The Fad, and The Ugly
The Lighter Side: Fashionista Flarf Blogger
A Formal Party
Editor’s Note: My Farewell
CPR Classic Readings: Philip Larkin’s “Broadcast”
CPR Classic Readings: Philip Larkin’s “Here”
An Ellipsis Experiencing Phantom Excitement In a Sentence Limb
A Glint of Bullion Hefted
Lost in the Cave of the Mouth
Chalkboard Dyspepsias & Intransitive Decantings
The Interpres-sive Lowell 
Nothing in Excess and Decorum as its Own Reward
Where Minutiae Outweigh Aeons
To Play Noughts & Crosses with Weighty Matters
The Untempered Clavier of Carl Phillips
The Problems of Prosody
Further News from the Rear 
No More than Offhanded Grace Miraculously Transformed into an Ormulu…
Wrought Fiery-Hot Upon a Grillwork of Transformations
The Swirling Crosswinds of a Made-up Metric
Englishing Ovid
The Celebrations of Life Aren’t Over Yet
Spinning the Web
A Home Away from Home
The Lost Children of America 
Speak, Ranjit
Surveying the Landscape
Reformulating Forms 
Tallying the Hemispheres 
Output and Ingathering: A Survey of First Books 
On Kalmi Baruh Street 
In Memoriam: Philip Lamantia (1927-2005)
“Under Empty Skies Falconers Weep”
“Under Empty Skies Falconers Weep” 
In the Details
What has Five Feet and Lives Forever?
Unguided and Apart: the Achievement of W.D.
Farther South Than This
Byrd or Cage?
An Agenda for Critics: Judgment
The Absolutist: The poetry and criticism of Yvor Winters
Sapphics for Students 
History for the Reformation 
Of Phonographs and Oily Birds 
Wrestling with the Angel
Landscape with Banana Peels 
All My Pretty Selves
Sell Outs and Stanzas: The Rockstar as Poet 
Wave and Stone, Verse and Prose: Novels-in-Verse vs. Poetic Narratives 
The Rules of Subversion
A New Literary Government?
A Literary Montenegro 
Risen Out of Necessity
“I Form the Light and Create Darkness”
Posturepedic® Poetry
Full Moon Fever
The Poetry We Deserve
Scoundrels and Saints 
Rich in the Loss
Scanning Evil: Snodgrass on Hitler
In the Grey Zone
The Deregulated Critic
Assimilation
Of Grids, Flux and the Patternless Expanse
Glossing the Ordinary
Difficult Transitions
The Multicultural Melt
Studying Sylvia
For the Record
Calls for Clarification
The Edge of Ireland
James Merrill’s Friends and Critics
In This Our Pinching Cave,  Shall We Discourse:  Three Recent Books  from BOA Editions
Priest and Poet  of God and of Wales 
Anxious of Eternity:  Building a Nest  for John Clare
For Unclassified Occasions and Purposes: The Maya Angelou Life Mosaic Collection at Hallmark
The Grand Zeugma:  The Poetic Project  of H. L. Hix
“The Revolution  Will Not be Poeticized…” 
The Critic’s Pleasure:  To Say What One Frankly Thinks
Vikram Seth: Poetry Of An Exile
E+V+O+L+U+T+I+O+N
Your Influences Here
Apt Vernacular
“Relativistic Ejecta”
From the [correct] Chinese
Mixed Economy
The Real Robert Lowell? 
Tiring the Sun with Poetry 
Seeing Through the Eye
The Year of Turning Seventy
Indispensable Books of  Indian Poetry in English
At Home in the Several Worlds
At So Many Removes
The Poet’s Prose
The Recent Yalies
Art & Leisure
Love and the Insurgency
Bland Ambition
The Etiology of Rafael Campo
Poetry, Spilt Religion, and the Poetic Imagination
Poetry in the Mother Tongue
The Enchanted Loom: A New Paradigm for Literature
Disorderly Orders
The Shape of Poetry
Three Decades of Mastery: The Poetry of R. S. Gwynn
The Voice of the Poet Part 8: Robert Lowell
Philip Larkin and His Adjectives
His Plain Far-Reaching Singleness
“Pacifier” by X. J. Kennedy
More Hits from the Bishop Jukebox
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp.,
Letters to the Editor – March 2010
The Most Unlikely Muse: Bill Ripley
Being at Ease
The Tell-Tale Line
Philip Larkin and Happiness
On “Born Yesterday”
An Agenda for Critics: Judgment
Masters of the Airy Manner: Auden and Byron
Aristocracies of One
Sailing Against the Current: Andrew Goodspeed on David Yezzi
Making the Grade: Andrew Goodspeed on James Agee
Rachel Hadas and the Role of the Poet-Critic
Cats and Bulldogs
The Inaugural Problem
On Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day” As Reviewed By: Robert Bernard Hass
“Sleeping in a Hobo Jungle Can Be a Dangerous Thing”: A Conversation with Richard Wilbur
Writing to their Higher Selves: Anthony Moore on Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
Scratched Surfaces
Spillage from the Riptides of Desire: Poetry Blurbs
In Memoriam: Reginald Shepherd (1963—2008)
The Drug of Art: David Wheatley on Ivan Blatný
The Passion of James K. Baxter: Part II
Disching It Out
About the Size of It by Tom Disch. Anvil Press Poetry Ltd, 2007.
In Memoriam: Tom Disch (1940 – 2008)
Hefty Measures
About the Size of It by Tom Disch. Anvil, 160 pages, $16.95
Tom Disch: Work Ethicist of American Poetry
Thomas M., Meet Tom
The First Confessionalist: Ernest Hilbert Interviews W. D. Snodgrass
The Passion of James K. Baxter
With My Little Eye
Nigh-No-Place by Jen Hadfield. Bloodaxe Books, 2008 As Reviewed By: Hannah Brooks-Motl
Echoes and Ashes: Adam Dressler on Davis McCombs
William Jay Smith and the Role of the Poet-Critic
In Memoriam: Sarah Hannah (1966-2007)
The Unadorned Life: Andrew Frisardi on John Haines
Celticly Wild, Teutonically Fussy
An Interview with X. J. Kennedy
A Prince in Motley
Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008, by X. J. Kennedy. BOA Editions, 2007. $17.00pb.
CPR Classic Readings
A More Bizarre Proteus
In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2007 by X. J. Kennedy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
The Poet of Play: Sonny Williams on X. J. Kennedy
Nothing is Beneath Consideration: Christopher Bakken on the Letters of Poets
The Adolescent: Marit MacArthur on Kenneth Koch
David Mason and the Human Place
Carmine’s CanLit
Getting Out of the Flames
Our Steps amid a Ruined Colonnade III: James Matthew Wilson on Grammar and Expression
Our Steps amid a Ruined Colonnade II: James Matthew Wilson on Expansive Poetry and its Discontents
Best Books of 2007: The CPR Awards
Taking Liberties: Louis Zukofsky
The Count of the Castle
In Memoriam: Anthony Hecht (1923-2004)
Our Steps amid a Ruined Colonnade: James Matthew Wilson on Contemporary Poetry and the Academy
Poetry at the Movies
CPR Classic Readings: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W.B. Yeats
Explaining the Modernist Joke: W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Letters from Iceland
The Louis MacNeice Special Issue
Louis MacNeice: “His Own Unchanging Self”
An Interview with Jon Stallworthy
Re-Collecting MacNeice
Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice edited by Peter McDonald. Faber and Faber, 2007. 836 pages.
The Tawdry Halo of the Idle Martyr: MacNeice’s Autumn Journal
CPR Classic Readings: “The Sunlight on the Garden” by Louis MacNeice
“The Sunlight on the Garden” by Louis MacNeice
The Blue Butterfly: Andrew Frisardi on Richard Burns
“What is the Language Using Us For?”
As Reviewed By: John Drexel
The Verse Hard-wired
Harbour Lights by Derek Mahon. The Gallery Press, 2005.
Tracing the Root of Metastasis
The Other Wiman
Pretty Pieces: Joan Houlihan on Nathaniel Bellows
I Sense Your Disdain, Darling: Frederick Seidel
The Cantankerous Contrarian
The Waking Chant of Sunrise: Kevin Ducey
“Yes, I used to drive with my eyes closed”: Ernest Hilbert Interviews Erica Dawson
Young Poets Calling: Part 3
Wakka-Wakka Sing-Song: D.H. Tracy on Vijay Seshadri
Extremely Difficult & Occasionally Unpleasant: The Poetry of Samuel Beckett
CPR Classic Readings: “At Melville’s Tomb”
Aspects of Robinson
CPR Classic Readings: Donald Davie’s “In the Stopping Train”
A Sentimental Education: Modern Poetry and the Anthology
Twanging of a Harp: Sonny Williams on Mary Oliver
A Dodge Bulletin
Notes from the Nation’s Poetry Festival
Twinkle, Twinkle, Mighty Tome It’s So Hard to Lug You Home
Best Books of 2006: The CPR Awards
Soft & Hard Surrealism
Cole Porter: The Devil Divine
CPR Classic Readings: James Matthew Wilson on Yvor Winters’ “The Slow Pacific Swell”
Young Poets Calling: Part 2
This is the Life of the Mind
Pounding the Catalogue
Resistance and “Sweet Traction”: Heaney as a Poet of the Underground
A Further Range
Three Invitations to a Far Reading
Wages of Fame: The Case of Billy Collins
A Guilty Pleasure: Reading the Reticence of Elizabeth Bishop
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp.,
Gleanings from the Cutting-Room Floor: Alfred Corn on Elizabeth Bishop
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp.,
The Art of Finding
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp.,
Terra Incognita, or British Poetry in America
As Reviewed By: John Drexel
The Plains Pastoral of B.H. Fairchild
Poetry’s Embedded Soldier
Here, Bullet by Brian Turner. Alice James Books, 2005.
To Cloak the Emptiness of One’s Yearnings: George Santayana Reconsidered
Best Books of 2005: The CPR Awards
The Sharp Compassion of the Healer’s Art: Garrick Davis on Adam Kirsch
Lost in Translation?
As Reviewed By: John Drexel
Timothy Steele and the Role of the Poet-Critic
Confidence Artist
The Civilized Yawp
On and Off of Parnassus
Artificer of Americana
The Voice of the Poet Part 9: Anne Sexton
The Voice of the Poet Part 7: Five American Women Poets
The Voice of the Poet Part 6: James Merrill
The Voice of the Poet Part 5: John Ashbery
The Voice of the Poet Part 4: Elizabeth Bishop
The Voice of the Poet Part 3: Sylvia Plath
The Voice of the Poet Part 2: Randall Jarrell
The Voice of the Poet: Part 1: W.H. Auden
The Voice of the Poet
CPR Remembers: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
The Innocent Ear: Some Thoughts on the Popular Disdain for Versification
Letters to a Young Poet: Rilke’s Non-Correspondence School
Rising from the Ashes: the Restored Ariel
Within the Jurisdiction of Form
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 by Seamus Heaney. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002.
Callbacks: A Survey of Second Books
From the Vault: The Secret Glory, Ernest Hilbert Interviews Franz Wright
Justice’s Sentimental Journey
In Memoriam: Donald Justice (1925-2004)
Best Books of 2004: The CPR Awards
In Memoriam: Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner (1923-2003)
The Achievements of Anthony Hecht
Collected Earlier Poems by Anthony Hecht. Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
Collected Later Poems by Anthony Hecht. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
In Memoriam: Thom Gunn
Thomson William “Thom” Gunn (1929-2004)
The Many Truths of Michael Donaghy
Michael Donaghy (1954-2004)
Czeslaw Milosz, an American
In Memoriam: Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)
The Lost Children of America
The Education of the Audience
Stray Thoughts from a Failed Experiment
Three Things to Forget About Contemporary Poetry
What’s Your MFA Program Like?
An Unscientific Survey of MFA Graduates
No Poet Left Behind
American Poetry Watchdogs: Garrick Davis on Foetry
An Interview with the Editors of Foetry
The Age of Anthologies: Sonny Williams Reviews Four New Collections
Tricks to Set the River On Fire: Feigned Eloquence in Lowell
The Yellow Pages of Poetry: Notes on the New Norton
A Terrible Beauty
The Pages of the Future
Obsessed with Writing
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
A Gull’s Game: D.H. Tracy on Louise Bogan
Is English Your Native Tongue?
As Reviewed By: John Drexel
At Home in the Several Worlds
The Oxford India Ramanujan, edited by Molly Daniels-Ramanujan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Reformulating Forms
A Close Reading of Two Contemporary Indian Poets
A Conversation with Jayanta Mahapatra
Indispensable Books of Indian Poetry in English
an inadequate but serviceable list
The Lasting Importance of The Cantos
Macbeth in Venice: D. H. Tracy on William Logan
“Than Longen Folk to Goon on Pilgrimages”
A Meditation on Pilgrimage and Poetry
August Kleinzahler & Anger Management
No Kidding: Two Debut Volumes
Robert Lowell in Fourteen Lines
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
An Interview with Herb Leibowitz: Editor of Parnassus
Passing Facts: Reviewing Lowell’s Reviewers
The Strangeness of James Dickey
Passing Facts: Reviewing Lowell’s Reviewers
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
Robert Lowell in Fourteen Lines
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
Tricks to Set the River On Fire: Feigned Eloquence in Lowell
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
The Interpres-sive Lowell
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
The Best Books of 2003: The CPR Awards
The Shrinking Lines of War: Marc Pietrzykowski on Ciaran Carson and Medbh McGuckian 
Can A Conference Save Poetry? Garrick Davis on the Pope of Rhyme and Meter in West Chester
A. R. Ammons’ Cookie-Cutter
Young Poets Calling: Part 1
Dana Gioia’s Defenders of the Modernist-Romantic Tradition
Geoffrey Hill: The Corpus of Absolution
The Sound of the Future
Oedipus Redivivus
Louise Glück’s Monumental Narcissism
A Tremulous Debut
Shakespeare’s Inner Workings
History Held Together with String
Telling the World
Berryman & Shakespeare
Slightly Lovely Stuff
Among the Ruined Silver-darks
As Reviewed By: Jocelyn Emerson
Confusion As An Operating Principle: Cort Day, Geoffrey Nutter, and the Contemporary “Sonnet-esque” Sequence
As Reviewed By: John Erhardt
F. D. Reeve’s Tales
Reviewed:
Geoffrey Hill: The Poet in Winter
As Reviewed By: John Drexel
Lessons Of The Masters: T. S. Eliot
Misunderstanding Ezra Pound
Hart Crane: American Futurist
On the Golden Age of Poetry Criticism
Dana Gioia and the Role of the Poet-Critic
Stephen Burt and the Role of the Poet-Critic
The Dead Shiite’s Kalashnikov: Preston Merchant on Poetry after 9/11
Logue Generals
All Day Permanent Red by Christopher Logue. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $18.00.
Adam Kirsch and the Role of the Poet-Critic
Designed for a Lifetime of Becoming: The Poetic Debut of Adam Kirsch
Mother’s Milk: Ernest Hilbert Reviews Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins
Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Can Poetry Matter?
Toward the New Futurism
From the Vault: Ernest Hilbert Visits Spender’s World
Beatnik Bohemia
Reviving Merrill
The Refining Instrument of Poetry: James Rother Interviews Sherod Santos
Eschatology and the Avant-Garde
Going Nowhere
Light And Sound
Madonna Anno Domini
The Breakdown Of Criticism Before The Printed Deluge
Kitsch and the Talking Cure

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