Page 2 - Nathaniel Mackey News Today

Since the 1970s, Los Angeles poet Will Alexander has pursued poetic language as a combustive yet precise zone of experience. In an interview with…

Through her scholarship and criticism, hooks, who died this week, rewrote our understanding of Black feminism and womanhood, and gave a generation of readers a new way of looking at the world.

David Grundy on A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle

Cartoon by Kim Warp Yet poetry seemed capacious enough for both approaches to history: making it up and plumbing its depths. Returning to “Chant des Andoumboulou” gave Mackey “a sense of society as a kind of poem, social ritual as a kind of poem. So, therefore, the poem as a kind of society, made up of elements like sound, and sense, and the look words have on a page, the look line breaks give to a poem.” He began moving away from poems as discrete pieces of writing—the...

Untitled, 1959. Art by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. Used by permission of Rich Shapero. © Rich Shapero. The Combustion Cycle (Roof Books, 2021), by Will Alexander, gathers three long poems written over two decades: “Concerning the Henbane Bird,” “On Solar Physiology,” and “The Ganges.” At more than 600 pages, the book calls attention to one of the great originals of contemporary US poetry, and at the same time it’s a record of something else—somethi...

The Paris Review’s mission has always been a dual one: to provide a platform for great literature, and to inspire readers with ambitious new writing. I’m proud that we’ve been able to accomplish both during my time at the Review, and I would like to thank the writers, readers, and colleagues on staff and the board who have collaborated with me toward these objectives . The project of the Review is an ongoing one—seven decades strong—but over the past three years, I’m particularly ...

Ana Božičević, Ken Chen, Craig Morgan Teicher Welcome to the final installment of this years poetry preview. Id like to thank Ana, Ken, Evie, and Phillip for joining me this year and bringing their unique sensibilities to this glimpse into the future. Our collective picks for the must-read poetry books of the coming year (dont forget to check out parts one and two of the preview) show, among other things, the incredible capaciousness of contemporary poetry. Ive never felt the urgent need for...

A strange turn occurs toward the middle of Frederick Seidel’s 2009 Paris Review interview. The poet, whom Adam Kirsch once deemed the best in the United States, describes himself as coming late to an appreciation of New York School poets James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara. Until this point in the conversation, Seidel’s distinctive sensibility snapped into place commensurate with his biography. His patrician vocabulary and profoundly conservative sense of rhyme and meter gestured toward his ...

December 14, 2020 Emergence Magazine is a quarterly online publication exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Each issue explores a theme through innovative digital media, as well as the written and spoken word. The Emergence Magazine podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories, and m...

On Dec. 7, newly-minted laureate Louise Glück delivered her Nobel acceptance speech outside of her Massachusetts home. In it, the poet expressed her lifelong interest in a kind of confessional poem, in which the speaker intimately addresses the reader. And in making her point, she lauded a work many found tone-deaf in the current climate, prompting some to compare the speech to blackface. Glück built her speech around a childhood competition she held for the greatest poem in the world. “The...