Contemporary Poetry Review

Letters to CPR: Marcus Bales responds to Richard Blanco Ballyhoo

the editors — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:00:18 +0000

Editor’s Note: Marcus Bales responded to the CPR’s recent series of articles on Richard Blanco’s Inaugural reading with this poem. Identity Poetical by Marcus Bales Identity Poet: I am the very model of identity poetical, My bio and my craftsmanship are blankly antithetical. The more that I’m selected for my principal ethnicity The easier [...]

Praising Athenians in Athens: On the Failures of the American Ceremonial Poem

Robert Bernard Hass — Tue, 07 May 2013 20:57:36 +0000

Perhaps the most surprising feature of Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem, “One Today,” is that hardly anyone took notice. In the week after the inauguration, the blogosphere was eerily quiet in regard to the poem. The Washington Post failed to run the complete text until Saturday, and the few online weeklies that bothered to devote any [...]

The Richard Blanco Debate

Quincy Lehr — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:06:39 +0000

Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem, “One Today,” sucked. Take the first stanza, which manages to be at once portentous, vaguely imperialistic, and dull: One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth across the Great Plains, then charging across the [...]

No Justice Done To Poetry At The Inauguration: On Richard Blanco

Joel Gehrke — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 20:16:38 +0000

John F. Kennedy’s request that Robert Frost read at his inauguration had no precedent in United States history, but, in retrospect, appears rather predictable. The 86-year-old writer was already “the embodiment of American poetry,” as Jay Parini puts it in his biography. Parini recalls that Kennedy enjoyed Frost’s poetry, and – more importantly, no doubt [...]

Dennis O’Driscoll (1954-2012): An Appreciation

Sunil Iyengar — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 22:36:47 +0000

Until recently, Dennis O’Driscoll was among the few living poets I most wanted to meet. He was also the only such poet whose writings I barely knew. Yet shortly after his sudden death on December 24, 2012 (a week shy of his 59th birthday), I resolved to fill this gap in the coming year. I [...]

Dancing In Borrowed Time: Bill Coyle on Andrew Sofer

Bill Coyle — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 16:40:40 +0000

Reviewed: Wave by Andrew Sofer. Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2010. 63 pages, $14.00 The epigraph to Andrew Sofer’s debut collection of poetry comes from Yehuda Amachai—“And for the sake of remembering / I wear my father’s face over mine”—and it could hardly be more apt. Among other things, the quotation prepares readers for [...]

The Man Who Killed Poetry: Joseph Epstein And His Essays

David X Novak — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:50:53 +0000

It is nearly twenty-five years since Joseph Epstein published his now famous essay—or as Dana Gioia referred to it, his “mordant 1988 critique”—under the flashy title “Who Killed Poetry?” (Commentary, August 1988) “A brilliant polemicist,” Gioia wrote, “Epstein intended his essay to be incendiary, and it did ignite an explosion of criticism.” That came from [...]

A Variety of Courage: John Foy on Gerry Cambridge’s Notes for Lighting a Fire

John Foy — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:57:54 +0000

If lighting a fire on a winter night is a way of staying alive, then so, one feels, was the writing of the poems in Gerry Cambridge’s new book, Notes for Lighting a Fire. These poems are filled with light and heat. They are often about light and staving off darkness and cleaving to [...]

Thomas Hardy’s Artistry in “The Darkling Thrush”

Bruce Bennett — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 16:11:28 +0000

I teach Hardy every other year in my “Modern British Poetry“ course at Wells College, and this year I decided to use “The Darkling Thrush” to introduce his work to students, many of whom had not read him before. As I looked particularly closely at the poem in preparation for the class—and then, later, during [...]

Thomas Hardy’s “In Tenebris”: The Problem of Relativity

Nicholas Friedman — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:27:12 +0000

Click here (and scroll to the bottom of the page) to read the poem sequence. I’d like to start by making a claim that I have recently asserted elsewhere: The lyric poem is fundamentally elegiac. That is, the lyric constitutes both the inscription of a moment’s utterance and a memento mori—an object that cannot help [...]