April 23, 2024

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera on Translating The Book of Conjurations

Poetry, like alchemy, can promise a material wealth it never quite delivers, transmutation through words, and the power to turn paupers into patrons, but most often promises an alchemy of the soul that strives toward a higher form. Irizelma Robles...

April 11, 2024

Matthew Fraleigh on The Same Moon Shines on All

The last few decades have been a time of great change for the field of Japanese literary studies. The scope of the category “Japanese literature” is very differently conceptualized than it was just a generation ago; it now embraces a...

April 9, 2024

Jonathan Chaves on Yanagawa Seigan

Perhaps the largest body of great poetry in the world as yet undiscovered is the verse composed by Japanese authors not in Japanese, but in literary Chinese (C., wenyan; J., bungen). The phenomenon of great literature written in a language...

April 2, 2024

André Colomer, the Action of the Arts, and the Importance of Poetry

Oskar De Wolf

– An individualist anarchist? To the uninitiated, it may appear somewhat peculiar that an individualist anarchist is a part of poetry month at the Columbia University Press blog. Anarchism has a well-earned reputation for being a little cold, a little...

September 29, 2023

Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho on Translating Gabriela Mistral’s Desolación

Gabriela Mistral, born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in Vicuña, Chile, has fascinated and puzzled scholars, writers, and artists alike for more than a century. Many have tried to weave together the variegated layers of her persona and her “emotionally outspoken verses,”...

September 13, 2023

Translating the Kokinshū into a Standard Prosodic Form

Torquil Duthie

The Kokinshū was always meant to become a classic. The ambition of its compilers was to make waka (vernacular Japanese poetry) the preeminent literary practice of the Japanese imperial court. Yet surely even they would have been surprised by the...

December 6, 2021

Caitlin Hurst and Ada Smailbegović on Poetics of Liveliness (Part 2)

Today’s post continues our interview with Ada Smailbegović about her book Poetics of Liveliness. Read the first part of Smailbegović and Hurst’s conversation, where they discuss rhythm and materiality, the world held at the edge of a razor, and how...

December 1, 2021

Caitlin Hurst and Ada Smailbegović on Poetics of Liveliness (Part 1)

Ada Smailbegović’s new book Poetics of Liveliness investigates the ways twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. The book shifts across scales to describe the subtly changing realms of molecules,...

April 22, 2021

“You Aren’t the Center, but the Radius”

Irina Shevelenko on Maria Stepanova’s Kireevsky, with translations by Eugene Ostashevsky

“The chill of having no place […] is the only thing that gives poetry a chance not to participate in the parade of general achievements, not to wind up as a passkey that opens the doors for a third-party, external...

May 13, 2020

Columbia University Press Announces the 2020 Student Poetry Contest Winners!

April was National Poetry Month, and this year, it marked the fourth annual high school poetry contest, in which high school students are invited to submit an original poem inspired by one from the Granger’s database. The contest has grown...

April 24, 2020

Book Excerpt! Poetry Unbound, By Mike Chasar (introduction)

“By disclosing what are at once poetry’s most inscrutable and its most public aspects, Chasar reorients our understanding of poetry’s relation to the media, throwing gasoline on the fire of a question we have dodged for too long: what is...

April 23, 2020

Origin Stories

By Mike Chasar

“A persuasive, thoroughly researched, memorable, and often delightful book. Mike Chasar has excelled in his ambitious coverage of primary sources. Moreover, this is a book that addresses questions that come up frequently in the poetry world about where and why...