A researcher spent 38 years asking whether his college classmates were happy. You don't have to have been in his class to learn something from the results.
January 25, 2013
Sound Check: W.S. Merwin’s Love of Foreign Language
A translator who puts his mark on poems—a bit too strongly.
January 08, 2013
The Knife—The Sharp Poetry of Louise Glück
IF LOUISE GLUCK had released a Collected Poems a dozen years ago, we would have known what to make of her. She was a walking dysphemism, a blade without a handle, a poet so intent on “unmasking … the ordinary to reveal the tragic,” as she put it, that any sign of kindness prompted bitter cynicism. “Mothers weep at their daughters’ weddings,/ everyone knows that, though/ for whose youth one cannot say,” she wrote in 1985. “My father liked/ to stand like this, to hold me/ so he couldn’t see me” (1990).
September 25, 2012
Memory Babe: Kerouac’s Girlfriend Remembers
Johnson’s closeness to Kerouac is invaluable for Johnson the memoirist, it is limiting for Johnson the disinterested biographer.
July 25, 2012
Flightlessness and Eggs
Campbell McGrath has never been a difficult poet, but his early work was complex and often exciting for the ease with which readers could feel its com
April 10, 2012
Poems and Persons
Being Numerous takes up the long and quixotic history of poets with ambitions as outsized as Yeats’s, such as George Oppen, Frank O’Hara, and a big gr
July 30, 2010
Hilarity and Form
Ben Lerner’s hilarity shares means and effects with a Cubist painting whose shards show a whole bottle from six angles. He recombines fragments of la
May 04, 2010
The Temptations of Art
If it is worrisome when a poet seems to lose his touch, it is great fun when he plays on our worries. This is the rhetorical hustle with which Robert
