• American Originality, Essays on poetry by Louise Glück

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• "I keep thinking it suits Rilke exactly that Paula Becker died; dead she is his creature, a mirror of, or adjunct of, the self. -- I cannot help but feel that Paula Becker is far more eagerly admitted into the poet's soul dead than she would have been alive: alive she was volatile, unreliable, separate in her will. -- And when Rilke, in the famous lines, urges, 'we need, in love, to practice only this: / letting each other go. For holding on / comes easily; we do not need to learn it,' I cannot help but believe that, for Rilke, letting go was in fact remarkably easy, that holding on, whatever might force engagement with the unmanageable other, was alien."
• "(systematic self-hatred is a familiar pole of narcissistic absorption)"
• "The paradox is that the named generates far more complex and powerful associations than does the unnamed."
• "Life, Dobyns means us to see, is all momentum, speeding up as the end approaches; it won't (like poetry) stand still."
• "That 'Oatmeal Deluxe' would not be grouped among Dobyns's harrowing poems makes the structural point more tellingly. The poem parallels creation as invention with creation as self-delusion: the woman in this poem cannot be spared suffering, but her insistence on self-delusion will prolong that suffering, and complicate it. As the turn makes plain, she insists on seeing this confrontation as a conflict of wills; the point, though, is that if she gets what she wants (a life with the speaker, the demonic creator), her suffering will begin in that life and culminate, after that life explodes, in a moment like the present moment, with the added bleakness of self-accusation. Why wouldn't she read the signs, why had she wasted so much time trying to effect impossible transformations? The alternative isn't freedom from pain, but the substitution of the pain that comes of facing the truth for the prolonged pain of denial."
• "Ironic, distant, and yet suffused also with helpless affection, the tribal affection of mortal for mortal, all of us flawed, doomed, embarked on courses of damaging affection, always ready to respond to Spanish music, in our foolish, desperate obsessions, all of us incipiently scarred."
• "He is a poet appalled by human fate, appalled that what can be foreseen cannot be prevented."
• "It seems too ready to inhabit the most dramatic extremes; too ready to deny loss as continuity, as immutable fact. It proposes instead a narrative of personal triumph, a narrative filled with markers like 'growth' and 'healing' and 'self-realization' and culminating in the soul's unqualified or comprehensive declaration of wholeness, as though loss were merely a catalyst for self-improvement."
• "And beauty, especially remembered beauty, which is insulated against erosion, functions in these poems like a promise: it holds the self firm in the face of crushing solitude and transience."

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• (Richard Siken): "Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again. / How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running / until they forget they are horses. / It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, / it's more like a song on a policeman's radio, / how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days / were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple / to slice into pieces. / Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means / we're inconsolable. / Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. / These, our bodies, possessed by light. / Tell me we'll never get used to it."
• (Fady Joudah): "My brother believed bad dreams could kill / A man in his sleep, he insisted / We wake my father..."
• (Arda Collins): "Don't put off your shower any more / listening to Chopin. / Take the preludes personally; / he's telling you that he can describe a progression / that you yourself have been unable to see, / shapely, broad light at one-thirty, / evening traveling up a road, / an overcast day as gentle bones. / Don't remember the music; / remember it as something obvious / that you are compelled, doomed, to obscure / and complicate. You erase it twice. / The first time / as you listened, unable / to have it, / the second time / as you were unable / to remember it. / Angry with Chopin, / what does he know?"
• (Arda Collins): "Gentle, painful sound, / it's coming from his face. / He doesn't want to talk, / hates the air; it moves towards the same things, / beautiful night, / beautiful night again, best missed / from afar..."