I thought about the small group of friends and mentors who have helped me to explore the darker corners of the soul through poetry, which is one of the functions of the lyric. Or, to put it another way, I thought about how friendship has helped me speak to both the pleasures and pains that constitute a life…

Read Henri Cole’s Paris Diary, Part VI: http://nyr.kr/XJQvll

(Source: newyorker.com)

Carolyn Kormann on the erotic poetry of John Donne, “a great visitor of ladies” and “a great writer of conceited verses”: http://nyr.kr/Z0oUxQ

  It isn’t merely love that’s blind. The love poet, too, can be heard stumbling and blundering about, sightless and ecstatic, as another Valentine’s Day dawns…

In honor of Valentine’s Day, Brad Leithauser reads the love poetry of Robert Graves: http://nyr.kr/12Mp2pb

(Source: newyorker.com)

“Most educated people can name half a dozen poets who are more famous for their messy lives and deaths than for their poems… The narratives endure because they align with the popular understanding of what it is to be an artist.”

Sarah Manguso writes about Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, and looks at the changing way we talk about mental illness: http://nyr.kr/1576DDa

Photograph: Contrasto/Redux.

(Source: newyorker.com)

“It’s hard to imagine the author of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”—the watcher of trees and grass, of frozen lakes and forested darkness—pinning up political posters in a crowded San Francisco bar. But, while the personality that comes through in Frost’s poems was a genuine one, it was also edited…”

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Frost’s death. Here, Joshua Rothman looks at the poet’s two sides: http://nyr.kr/VSHmr5

Photograph: Library of Congress.

Ian Crouch looks at a brief history of Inaugural poems, from Robert Frost to Elizabeth Alexander, and tells us what we should listen for when Richard Blanco reads his poem on Monday: http://nyr.kr/13MvxHv

Photograph by B. Anthony Stewart/National Geographic/Getty.

(Source: newyorker.com)

“We may be even more alive than we understand…”

Michael McClure on his poem in this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/UNTuYm

Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

(Source: newyorker.com)

One Friday evening at BAM this past summer, roughly twelve minutes into Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s four-and-a-half-hour-long avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk, “Einstein on the Beach,” a man sitting a row ahead of me stole a glance at his watch. It seemed an eloquent gesture. Not as a verdict on the show—which has been rightly hailed and heralded across the world—but as a vignette of our contemporary busyness. Nowadays, encounters of the spirit must be scheduled long in advance…

Giles Harvey’s notes on being busy: http://nyr.kr/UcBGta

(Source: newyorker.com)

The power’s back on! Let’s dry our socks,

And turn the volume down on Fox,

Mix up a vat of eggnog, brandied,

And fling a last Bronx cheer at Sandy.

Kick out the jams! Swing wide the gates!

Yeah, everybody—celebrate!

Come on in, friends. Pull up a chair,

Or hunker by the fireplace there…

Continue reading Ian Frazier’s holiday poem: http://nyr.kr/UosJKl