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I happened upon this poem on the New York Review of Books's website, and was startled by how beautifully Wislawa Szymborska captures the dance between motion and stillness in Vermeer's painting "The Milkmaid"—a moment frozen yet continually happening.

Vermeer

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.

I love the shape of the poem—it thins like a stream of milk, pouring itself out. I also love the tension she sets up between the "W" and the "w", which appears hierarchical but is also slippery.

"Vermeer", Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

“World Enough” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Maureen McLane’s second poetry collection, is a vacation unto itself. Her poems immerse readers in languid summer nights in the country and Parisian days. It is a treatise of sorts on the idea of "place": the mental, physical, visual and  emotional spaces we inhabit.

The forms of McLane's poems travel too; some are modelled after British romantic ballads, others the French rondeau, a few take inspiration from the haiku and some come in free verse. This exploration, sometimes playful, sometimes academic, grants these poems lives of their own.

McLane is a professor of English at New York University, a frequent essayist and winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Nona Nalakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. In keeping with the travel theme, Maureen McLane answered More Intelligent Life's questions about criticism, form and the visual aspects of writing from “a remote region of the American north-east”.

More Intelligent Life: "World Enough" seems to encompass many worlds, emotional, temporal, natural. Why the title, "World Enough"?

Maureen McLane: The phrase “world enough” surfaced more or less organically in my poem, “Passage I":

I thought I had all the time
and world enough to discover what I should
when it was over

The phrase itself comes from Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”—

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.  read more »

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Mark Strand's poems are sparse luminous things, notable both for their simplicity and slight tinge of surrealism. In many, anxiety hovers on the periphery of the poem, waiting to be invited in.

Strand received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2009, and is one of the most important contemporary American poets and translators. (If you have a spare moment, please check out his translations of Carlos Drummond de Andrade.)

Yet Strand never set out to be a poet, but studied painting in college instead. He held a sustained interest in art and has written about the painters that move him, to great success: “Of the many pieces of writing stimulated by Hopper, none is more coolly and eerily attentive (more Hopperesque, we could say) than Mark Strand’s brilliant small book Hopper," wrote John Updike in the New York Review of Books.   read more »

Daisy Hay's new book "Young Romantics" explores the intertwining lives of Shelley, Byron, Keats and their cohort, detailing "a web of lives, within which friendships fade, allegiances shift, and nothing remains static for very long." In honour of this tremendous work of scholarship, we've plucked five tidbits from the pages of Hay's tome—a few things you might not have known about your favourite poets and thinkers of the 19th century.

1. At age 22 Shelley insisted on a diet of bread, butter and "a sort of spurious lemonade" until a friend, Thomas Love Peacock, convinced him to start eating meat again. Shelley's complexion improved.

2. The writer John William Polidori developed a serious crush on 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft and "jumped from a wall in an effort to impress her, spraining his ankle badly in the process." A few days later she told him that she thought of him mostly as a little brother.

3. Lord Byron enjoyed singing Albanian songs consisting of "strange, wild howls" while boating with Shelley in order to exacerbate their "contest with the elements."

4. Upon his release from Surrey Gaol for libel charges, Leigh Hunt, a critic and writer, created for himself a new study "which bore a startling resemblance to his prison bower." His books, busts, flowers and piano were all carefully transported from his prison cell. "His new room was lily- rather than rose-themed, but in all other respects it was similar to his prison accommodation."  read more »

"For me a poem is living and breathing," says Tina Chang, Brooklyn's poet laureate (yes, there is such a thing). Such declarations always sound a bit vague and pretentious. Yet Chang ends up owning this statement, and even imbuing it with a demystifying beauty over the course of this audio slideshow about her approach to writing poetry, from the New York Times. 

Dan Chiasson’s poetry is “unsettled and unsettling,” wrote Kay Ryan in the New York Times. “So much in Chiasson is uncomfortable and misproportioned. So much suffers. At the same time, his poetry is mischievous and meant to be understood playfully.” Ryan made those observations in 2005, just after the release of Chiasson’s second collection of poetry, “Natural History”. But her description remains apt. In “Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon”, published by Knopf on February 2nd (and out in Britain later this year), Chiasson applies his analytical, nervous, literary and often playful sensibility to the poignancy of parenthood.

"It's very easy to identify with your child," Chiasson says over the phone from his home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. "It's also very weird because there are things about your child that you'll envy in a way. So there's a split consciousness. You can see yourself as the child and you can see yourself as the father."

In new poems, such as "Man and Derailment" and the multi-part "Swifts", Chiasson juxtaposes childhood memories of his own father with a decidedly adult consciousness. (In the former, a man takes his son to a ravine to view a train crash; the child internalises the scene by wondering "how he would remember the scene / and, once he knew his father better, later, / and later, knew himself better, what it would mean.")  read more »

How can you resist a "poetry and illustration magazine gently intent on
hoodwinking poetry back from the clammy hands of tweed jackets and school
anthologies"? It's not often that a mission statement–– that rote recycler of wearisome
phrases––whets a reader's appetite. Even better, Popshot delivers on its promise.

Jacob Denno, the young founder and editor of this small, Britain-based magazine, wisely chose to set a theme for each issue. Parameters can ease readers into a more unusual reading experience. Popshot also includes a brief primer on how it should be read. Presumptuous? Not really. "Make yourself a cup of tea or find a suitable biscuit," the editors suggest. "This magazine does not benefit from being skim read." In high school it's always the stricter teachers that earn the most attention. Ditto magazines: Popshot's refusal to pander demands a level of alertness that the contemporary magazine-reader is perhaps unaccustomed to giving. Happily, the alertness is earned.

For the second issue, just released and with an "Us & Them" theme, the poems–24 of them–are energetic and smart. A précis follows each one, a patient addendum to illuminate a poet's intentions. If the poems tend to overshadow the illustrations, it is only because this reader happens to be drawn to words over forms (which tend to have a more supportive role here anyway; the poems are selected first, and are then sent to illustrators). Small enough to fit in to a coat pocket, Popshot is a reminder that poetry thrives in the 21st century, if perhaps in unexpected forms, if perhaps in unexpected forms.  read more »

I have always been unclear about where the emphasis in "Keats House" is meant to fall. The neat white cottage is famously where John Keats spent two of the most incandescent years of his starburst career--allegedly composing "Ode to a Nightingale" under a plum tree in its roomy garden and pursuing a destructive passion for his neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Yet the glaring absence of apostrophe, the English Heritage-robustness of the name, reminds us that this is a House first, separate from the fleeting glory of a former inhabitant.

Of course, this former inhabitant is what procured the building its £424,000 ($763,000) refurbishment grant from the National Lottery in 2004. The house had been stumbling along as a museum, its furnishings gradually tiring, after having passed through various hands since Keats left for Rome in 1820. The two-storey, 19th-century house reopened this summer after its painstaking restoration, and is now brimming with displays of Keats memorabilia.  read more »

To call any art form 'accessible' conjures up the worst: framed posters of Monet's water lilies and ice in your pinot. But when it comes to poetry, accessibility is a way in. Billy Collins, former poet laureate and champion of accessible poetry, is a master at this. He locates the reader, providing a surface much like our familiar everyday world, and then manipulates plain speech and quotidian images and observations. Like the disorientation of waking up at the end of a long car trip, you bring your eyes up from the page, confused and in another town, with everything sadder, deeper or more refracted.

While Katha Pollitt is not quite so ready and beguiling as Collins, her plain speech and razor-sharp observations are what make "The Mind-Body Problem", her second book of poems, sing. A columnist at the Nation, she brings the columnist's role of insightful friend and confidant into her verse. Her poems reveal something worth seeing--about her, or the world, or both. Take the titular poem:

It seems unfair, somehow, that my body has to suffer
because I, by which I mean my mind, was saddled
with certain unfortunate high-minded notions
that made me tyrannize it and patronize it
like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious
English-professor husband ashamed of his wife--
her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles
and regional vowels.  read more »

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Ah April, that glorious month when the weather is erratic and poetry gains a few more hours in the spotlight. National Poetry Month invariably prompts a flurry (or steady trickle) of articles and musings about whether poetry is a dying art form, or even if it has a place in modern society at all.

In Newsweek Marc Bain cited a study by the NEA that found that in 2008 just 8.3% of adults had read any poetry in the preceding year. "That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent...the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years."

It sounds bad, sure, but Bain suggests we needn't ring the alarm just yet. Such studies often lean towards Chicken Little alarmism, as "poetry has been supposedly dying now for several generations". He writes:

In 1934, Edmund Wilson published an essay called "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Fifty-four years later, Joseph Epstein chimed in with "Who Killed Poetry?" and former NEA chairman Gioia gained fame with a 1991 piece titled "Can Poetry Matter?" In answering their titular questions, all three to some degree concluded that poetry's concentration in the hands of specialists and the halls of academia was bad for the art form's health.

Former poet laureate [Donald] Hall, who published an essay called "Death to the Death of Poetry" in 1989, has heard it all before. "I'm 80 years old," he says. "[For] 60 years I've been reading about poetry losing its audience.  read more »

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