Czesław Miłosz was a Polish poet. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. Both his poetry and his writing about twentieth-century poetics have had a great influence on me.
Geosi Gyasi is an avid reader and blogger based in Ghana who has interviewed a wide range of authors over several years. He discovered my work through a poem recently published in Rattle, and asked some interesting questions in our interview–about how formal study has influenced my poems, about how I see technology shaping poetry, …
As the year comes to a close, I find myself in a reflective mood. Having compiled a list of the more than 350 poets I have mentioned on my website since I began writing about poetry in 2003, I was curious to discover which poets I have mentioned most often in the last ten years. …
“Our planetary reality has split in two into the so-called West and the so-called East, and I have drunk from both one and the other poisoned well. I have also become convinced that the puzzle of the thirties still cries out for a solution.” -Czesław Miłosz I find myself intensely drawn to twentieth-century Polish poets. …
“In art, you’re free.” –Marvin Bell One of the delights of my web presence is that I sometimes get emails from writers and readers fairly new to poetry. Recently, a young marketing executive in Singapore wrote to me. In our most recent exchange, he rightly points out that, especially in the US, there seem to …
There are many taboos in poetry. Some of them cycle in and out of fashion. For example, in the wake of so much confessional poetry of the last few decades, many contemporary poets now spurn an insecure, dramatic speaker in favor of the quiet power that comes from a more detached, objective presentation. In fact, …
Had a great trip down to the South coast, the highlight being a sword fight with a four-year-old on the bowling green of Carisbrooke Castle. We crossed the Solent in the kind of gale that threatened the Fastnet Race. Unfortunately, that meant we couldn’t take the hovercraft–but the fast catamaran only pitched and rolled during …
Back in London and the Polish-English Interchange Read More »
