Creation Chained to a Stunned Repose by Daniel Tobin

Larry Levis had wanted to die. He’d killed himself, his close friend and fellow poet David St. John told my high school English class years ago during an after-hours reading in Fresno, California, not literally but by habituating himself to so many mundanely self-destructive habits.

Patti had been the one to introduce me to the poets who changed my life, the course of my life. One of them was Dana Levin.

In 1934, when he was 17, Lowell determined to be a poet; by the end of that year he had written 30 poems. Such productivity can be a symptom of mania, as Jamison notes elsewhere, though of course it can also just be a sign of ambition.

That the object of education should be to fit the child for life is such a trite and well-worn saying that people smile at its commonplaceness even while they agree with its obvious common sense.

Rumi was born in the early thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan. He later settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, with his family. His father was a preacher and religious scholar, and he introduced Rumi to Sufism.

As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I eyed their blue tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red rustling leaves of the sturdy oak-trees by the road-side, a sound was in my ears as of a Siren's song; I was stunned

Berfrois is delighted to announce that the Berfrois Poetry Prize is back.

The Captain-elect of a new Ship of Fools, his vassals jockeying for position aboard the whirling vessel, packing for the move, appears to be offering a revision of Snyder’s argument – to wit: The free world is simply a racket.