It sometimes seems that there are two levels of poets in America: the famous who have been the Poet Laureate and/or have won the Pulitzer Prize and/or National Book Award, whose books sell from a large publisher with a major distributor; and the rest of us, just getting along in good faith or in desperation, lucky to find publishers so that our books will exist, lucky to get a thousand copies of a book around. The twenty-five or so stars will pack a hall, folks will line up to get books inscribed, Bill Moyers will interview them, anthologists will never leave them out. We others are the underground or compost. Some few of the famous will remain famous, most will join us as the compost of the age, and some of our poets currently without laurels will rise into consequential identity in Time. And all is as it should be.

A Conversation With William Heyen by Philip Brady, Artful Dodge December 27, 2001

TEN GREAT POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2010 posted by Paul Muldoon @ The New Yorker December 16, 2010

Eleven Best Poetry Books of 2010 posted by Dan Chiasson @ The New Yorker December 6, 2010

The Onion’s A.V. Club has forthrightly apologized after discovering that one of their writers wrote a review of a book without reading it. Because it hadn’t been published yet. How’d the writer manage to fool his editors? Watch and learn.

In a year which saw new books from three doyens of English-language poetry – Seamus Heaney, Les Murray and Derek Walcott – Roddy Lumsden presents the new generation from Britain and Ireland in Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, £12), anthologising 85 poets from an estimated 1,000 who have either published first collections over the past 15 years or are on the point of doing so.

Traveling Light
Linda Pastan – W. W. Norton & Company -January 31, 2010

Traveling Light

I’m only leaving you
for a handful of days,
but it feels as though
I’ll be gone forever—
the way the door closes

Read rest of poem @ HUGOSCHWYZER.NET

I’m disturbed that, increasingly, people are becoming acquainted with poets only by reading their poems on the Internet. And then, after reading say five or six poems, they say, “There, now I know the poet’s work. I don’t have to buy and read his book.” The thing is, a poet’s book is the entire experience, not individual poems. To not know a poet’s book is to not know the poet as a whole—only as a toe, a left arm, maybe a calf, an elbow, a kneecap. The parable about blind men and an elephant relates to this. Finding a poem or poet on the Internet is wonderful, but only if it doesn’t stop there. -Dick Allen

Dick Allen Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand – Connotation Press Issue IV, Volume II : December 2010

Fall 2010 has been a great season for poetry. There are important retrospectives of H. L. Hix’s remarkable career and that of the leading Arab poet, Adonis; new work by exciting young African American poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Major Jackson; politically charged poetry by C. D. Wright and Anna Rabinowitz; late-career flourishes by veterans Paul Muldoon and Charles Simic; engaging experimental poetry by John Taggart and Julie Carr; and solidifying entries by poets of international stature like Kamau Brathwaite and Wislawa Szymborska.

Today’s excerpt is by Adrienne Rich. It’s coming out on January 17.

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 W. W. Norton & Company

Fracture

When on that transatlantic call into the unseen
ear of a hack through whiskey film you blabbed
your misanthrope’s
misremembered remnant of a story
given years back in trust

Read rest of poem @ /One/: The Journal of Literature, Art and Ideas.

Walking Papers: Poems
Thomas Lynch – W. W. Norton & Company

Calling

We Catholic boys all listened for The Call.
The Voice of God, exquisite in our ears—
Come follow me, or, as it was with Paul,
Thunder, enlightening, the bang and whisper
By which God makes His will known to us all.
Be Fruitful. But not apples. Is that clear?

Read rest of poem @ Poetry Daily.

A Walk in Victoria’s Secret: Poems
Kate Daniels – Louisiana State University Press

The Pedicure

It was a birthday gift from my husband who remembered,
I suspect, those luscious, toe-sucking days of our early lust.
Now, a hard decade into parenting and home ownership,
those tentacular extensions of our mutual pleasure
had surrendered their erotic glow, and grown mundane
as garden stones displaced beneath the blankets of our bed.

Read rest of poem @  Chapter 16.

Second Nature: Poems

Margaret Gibson – Louisiana State University Press

Poetry is the Spirit of the Dead, Watching

I.

Unpacking books, shelving them
in the library of this old house,
I come across The Duel, a chapbook
Louis Rubin made of poems I wrote
before I left school. The book—

Read rest of poem @ Image.

The Volcano
Norman Dubie – Copper Canyon Press

The Volcano

The filling station is a blue can
of sardines edged with rose granite,
rope and wooden ore buckets
at the high-water nest of burning grass
in the baking mud of the paloverde.

Read rest of poem @ Copper Canyon Press.

Michael Hettich – Anhinga Press

The Funeral

Today I am walking around our town,
down to the waterfront, up the hill to the small church
that looks out across the harbor, and into the chapel
with its wonderful stained glass windows
and its one clear window with the stunning view

Read rest of poem @ Anhinga Press.

Honeycomb: Poems
Carol Frost – Triquarterly

Apiary viii (For the ones

who line the corridors and sit
silent in wheelchairs
before the television with the volume off,
whose cares
are small and gray and infinite,
time as ever to be faced    …

Read rest of poem @ The Poetry Foundation.

Bathsheba Transatlantic
Sarah Wetzel – Anhinga Press

Holy Site

She tells the boy it’s a water tower.
Concrete gray and green, it rises forty feet
on iron legs; egg-shaped lank and warped, the body
curves like a turned bell. The roof rusted through

Read rest of poem @ Ahinga Press