The ostensible cause was Kent’s Emily Post-Avant piece critiquing Amanda Gorman’s poem for the Biden inauguration, which an editor at The Typescript said was “antithetical to our values.” I’ve sometimes disagreed with Kent, both in private exchanges and on the pages of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, but I see nothing particularly offensive about the Gorman column, with the possible exception of calling Lady Gaga a “narcissistic bitch.”

Johnson’s work is distinguishable for its international breadth and for its pugilism.

He listens to the life inside life for the life outside life.

He has a cause and he has devoted himself to it. I can’t say God bless him but I can say Poets bless him.

“It sucks being a famous poet. / All your time gets taken up on / the phone or in answering emails / from people looking for a blurb, / and stuff. It’s totally tiresome!”

Echoes from so many sources, augmenting frequencies, ostensibly bitching about insufficient personal rewards — but more fundamentally, questioning the Peter Principle that underlies curatorial commodification.

Satirists live in a kind of poetic permanent revolution: “to mock,” a Greek proverb goes, “is to thumb through Archilochus” (Guy Davenport, 7 Greeks).

“The visitor wanted to create some very special clothing for the special person, like nobody had ever seen.”

As the partisan of energy as a form of imagination, Will Alexander relentlessly critiques linear conceptions of cause and effect, along with all mechanistic modalities of thought and practice.

with paintings by Varda Caivano

Selections from Invisible by Jacek Gutorow, translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk.

“small e for entropy / big S for Sacraments”

Fagan’s poems ask us what kind of attention we pay to the world and if that attention pays off, whether or not the world pays us back with a measure of truth.

… the most important episode in the history of Nicaraguan poetry was the formation of the Vanguardia group, one of the last of the interwar avant-gardes and the only one to emerge in Central America.

Every time a new technology is invented our first thought is, how can I use this to get off? Our second: how can we use this to talk to the dead?

Art, that great teacher, says to us, like Robert Frost’s most famous lines, “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”

Four prose pieces by Dan Elkind.