Nonfiction

* I first read some poems of Bill Knott's in magazines nearly 10 years ago, in the Fall of 1967. I was a sophomore in college. I remember being stunned by the passion and mystery of the poems. At that time I'd only been reading contemporary poetry with any direction for a year or so…

There is more continuity between North & South, Elizabeth Bishop's first book, and the nine new poems of Geography III, her latest, than the familiar and central image of travel. The new poems dramatize even more painstakingly what is perhaps the most fundamental issue in all of her poetry – seeing the ways nothing about…

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and…

* Like most people who sense that their love affair is going to pieces, Anna Karenina and Prince Vronsky try a few desperate measures to check the disintegration. One of these measures – available only to the upper classes – was travel. They go abroad, to Italy, and there they make the acquaintance of an…

"Like a rock in the sea, she was islanded by fields, the heavy grass washing about the house, and the cattle wading in it as in water. Even their gentle stirrings were a loss when they moved away at evening to the shelter of the woods. A rainy day might strike a wet flash from…

I first read Howl when I was a freshman in college. I thought that it was profound and disturbing, until a respected teacher asked me why all freshmen seemed to read Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Kahlil Gibran. I quit all three. Since then (like most people) I've got comfortable with A Supermarket in California and America;…

Some of my favorite poems by Elizabeth Bishop are not among her Complete Poems published in 1969. They have appeared singly since and whet the appetite for a new collection. Not counting several translations of Brazilian verse, eight new poems have appeared in. The New Yorker: "In the Waiting Room," "Night-City (From a Plane)," "12…

Herbert's poetry is an imitation of an action. Or rather, it is an imitation of a transaction. Usually, it goes beyond imitation to engage in the transaction. My critical point of departure is gift-giving, and I have chosen gift-giving not simply because it is a recurrent image or motif in Herbert's poetry but because it…

(from Contos de Aprendiz) I was born on a July afternoon in a small town called Turmalinas, which had a jail, a church and a school, all near each other. The jail, with its peeling wall, was old. God only knows how the prisoners inside lived and ate, but it held an inescapable fascination for…