“we dead stand undefended everywhere” —James Wright How did the Silver Jews have it? Punk rock died when the first kid said / “punk’s not dead.” This may be true of poetry, too. I die a little, in any case, whenever one of those mid-career In...

When I was first asked to write on this subject, I imagined discussing what I’ve learned from such poets as Cavafy, Olds, and Bidart, when it comes in particular to the body and desire and where that desire can lead and how to speak...

I was an undergrad, it was my junior year, and a poetry workshop (the teacher was famous and beloved, a darling, and I wanted to be a darling like that (like that? I should say, like her, because she was a person, not an...

August Kleinzahler, our favorite "witty, gritty poet" (Publishers Weekly), penned two original pieces for FSG's National Poetry Month. The poem "Snow Approaching on the Hudson" offers a striking and atmospheric view of New York City. In "Notes on Snow Approaching," Kleinzahler steps back...

Our favorite time is here again—happy National Poetry Month! We'll be celebrating with thirty days of exclusive features, from essays to videos to poetry excerpts, honoring the great poets who have shaped and challenged our view of the world. In the words of T....

We are honored to publish Frank Bidart, whose book of collected poems Half-Light is the winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry. These poems, penned between 1965 and 2016, embody a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes wild appetites, the monsters, the...

We're pleased to present a new poem from Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Afghan Girl.” Schnackenberg sat down with poet Susan Gillis (The Rapids, 2013) and professor Gregory Fried to discuss the process of writing the poem, the inspiration from Steve McCurry’s iconic war photograph, and the...

So Where Are We? So where were we? The fiery avalanche headed right at us—falling, flailing bodies in midair— the neighborhood under thick gray powder— on every screen. I don’t know where you are, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I heard a man say; the man who had spoken...

ENGLISH 206 Why would anyone even want to do it anymore? Fifty-two years ago I didn’t know what it was, And yet I knew I wanted to do it too, like the idea of a mind The self aspires to, the self a mind endeavors to become. I...

Rather than reflect on his poems or essays, which are still here for anyone to read or reread, I want to say a few words about our friendship, one whose nature, though central, is hard to capture, apparently uneventful as it was. Everything that...

Peter Cole and Christian Wiman, two longtime friends, recently exchanged e-mails about the process of selecting their own work for their latest collections. Wiman’s book of selected poems, Hammer Is the Prayer, published by FSG in 2016, was “a stunning reminder of how...

In trying to sum up the experience of having spent the last ten years editing the poetry of Marianne Moore, most recently in the New Collected Poems, I think of a recent classroom interaction I had. Toward the end of a course on...

Two items from the poet John Ashbery’s private collections appear on the cover for The Songs We Know Best. One is a yellow card from the early 1940s that his father, Chester "Chet" Ashbery, designed to advertise goods sold by the Ashbery...

The madness of March is past, and true to form—here in New York, at least—“lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches.” What does that mean? It’s National Poetry Month! Starting today, we will regularly post new pieces related to all things poetry. Expect...

I met Bill Knott in late 1968, or in early 1969, at William Corbett’s house, a gathering place for poets in Boston’s South End. I’d read Knott’s highly acclaimed first book, The Naomi Poems, from Big Table, in the spring of 1968. It was...

THREE POEMS is the brainchild of Max Freeman, a Brooklyn-based poet and filmmaker. Inspired by a film of Frank O’Hara reading “Having a Coke with You,” Max invites poets over to his studio to read three poems. For Poetry Month we matched...

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody,” Rilke wrote in his response to a request for advice and feedback from the nineteen-year-old aspiring poet Franz Kappus. “I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps.” Rilke’s...

I love the sense of buffeting by wind, birds, trees and some enigmatic power that leaves me feeling energized in ways that cannot be named. —Sheryl Cotleur Three Ways of Looking at God 1. A claustrophobia of sand and stone: a walled heat. The light bleaches and curves like...

Nothing was ever more astute than William Carlos Williams’s “A poem is a machine made of words.” (If it sounds cold or technocratic, think of the machine as a music box or a bicycle.) Schuyler’s little machine is more intricate than it looks. When...

Marianne Moore’s masterpiece “The Fish” is that rare poem that enters the mind through the front door and the back door at the same time. There’s not another poem that has its cake and eats it too like “The Fish” does. It luxuriates in...