Great Symbols Enacted the Age!
A new collected volume tries to finally make Delmore Schwartz’s oeuvre whole. To read it is to enter his world of symbols and subways, grand ideas and sacred genealogies.
Spring 2025
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Know Your Enemy: Against Despair, with Christian Wiman
Matt and Sam talk to the poet Christian Wiman about his recent book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair.
The Poetry of a Prison Uprising
A new book of poems from a workshop at Attica in the 1970s reveals how prisoners resisted the dehumanizing effects of incarceration.
The Proletarian Poet
A new book on Claude McKay is part of an effort to place the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance within the Black radical tradition.
Witnessing War, with Carolyn Forché
The author of What You Have Heard Is True talks about her political education in El Salvador.
The World of Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich’s politics developed over many years because she came by them as an artist—which may be what allowed her to become, unusually, both more self-questioning and more combative as she aged.
On Blueness: A Conversation with Joshua Bennett
Joshua Bennett talks about writing poetry after Ferguson.
The Sobbing School: Three Poems
Three poems from Joshua Bennett’s The Sobbing School.
The Protest Poets
Our nation’s language when it comes to race is exhausted. These poets are forging a new one.
Central Railway, Sydney 
A 1996 poem by the late Philip Levine.
Postcards from Empire
At the height of colonialism, indentured Indian women in the Caribbean were photographed for a thriving postcard industry. Their images enact a struggle—between the imaginations of colonial-era photographers and the real lives of the women behind the portraits.
For Philip Levine, Poet and Friend
(1928–2015)
Colleagues, critics, and obituary writers have described Philip Levine as “poet of the American working class,” “a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,” the poet who explored “his gritty Detroit childhood; the soul-numbing factory jobs he held as a …
Teaching Poetry in the Provinces
“…Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of `facts’ they feel stuffed…`brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion, without moving…Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology…That …
Prediction: A Poem
If N beats K Or K beats N The electorate is bound to win The blessings of a four-year grin…
Two Poems
CENTRAL RAILWAY, SYDNEY In a shit-house stall in Central I saw the one word “Mum” and thought once more of young men torn by want or war or hunger from their families, the West Virginian I wrote of thirty years …
