Thinking through poetry

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "The Peach Tree Carnival in Georgia." New York Public Library Digital Collections.

"What good is a flourishing poetry market, if what we read in poetry books renders us more confused, less appreciative of nuance, less able to engage with ideas, more indignant about the things that annoy us, and more resentful of others who appear to be different from us? The ability to draw a crowd, attract an audience or assemble a mob does not itself render a thing intrinsically good." Rebecca Watts on the trends toward the *marketably* honest in poetry at the PN Review. She gives a very interesting interview about the claims in the article, too, at the BBC's Front Row.

"These poems speak from the vulnerability that surfaces when we realize love and independence are not in any way guaranteed." Some thoughts on doubt, Brittany Perham's Double Portrait, and Natalie Shapero's Hard Child at The Literary Review.

"It is not because Indictus is written by a woman, from a woman’s perspective, that it is worth reading. To reduce it to such a use is to perpetuate rather than transcend a structure of inequality, and more importantly to our purposes here, it is to threaten the very practice of art making itself." A review and some questions about poetry and criticism now at the Tourniquet Review. 

Less about poetry: "If on some subterranean level of this conversation all men are presumed guilty, then all women are innocent, and I guess my question is, Do we really want that innocence? What is the price of it?" Katie Roiphe questions whether doubt, discussion, and diverging points of view are even possible in the current feminism at Harper's. "Isn't silencing women what we are fighting against?" she asks.