Parini, Jay. "Dead Poets' Society." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION April 11, 2010.

Poetry is conversation, and poets like to sit at an imaginary table, agreeing with what was said by other poets, chafing at their arguments, avoiding or responding (directly or indirectly) to their assertions. This conversation is the stuff of culture, and without the rough-and-tumble of what scholars often loosely call "influence," there would be no poetry. There is a further layer here, contained in a phrase from T.S. Eliot, "under the sign," that Christopher Ricks—critic, poet, and professor of humanities at Boston University, to say nothing of one of the finest readers of poetry in our time—uses in his new book, True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (Yale University Press). Eliot used the suggestive phrase in a letter, saying that four poems in his earliest collection were written "sous le signe de Laforgue"; what that means, I suspect, is that Eliot felt conscious of Laforgue's presence while writing those poems. He felt the sway of his precursor, his guiding intellect, a certain dry ironic tone that he found useful in his own verse at the moment of writing. Critics have long discussed "influence," often in vague terms, and there is a never-ending stream of influence studies within academe—as in Harold Bloom's idiosyncratic but suggestive sequence of books in the 1970s and 80s, beginning with The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Bloom famously "theorized" the concept of influence by putting the process within the framework of Freudian psychoanalysis and its anxiety principle. He saw poets in perpetual conflict with those who went before them. Weak poets, in his view, depended too heavily on those whom they imitated; strong poets necessarily pulled away from their influences as they struggled to create voices of their own, often engaging in a process of misreading, which Bloom mapped in elaborate ways. Needless to say, the Bloomian notion was fraught for poets, as they looked over their shoulders with a sense of terror. Influence became an obstacle to creativity. In my view, that seems a mistaken notion, however intriguing for critics. Perhaps as we think about poetry this month—National Poetry Month—we may reconsider the idea of influence. I would argue that poets have always thought of themselves as participating in a larger conversation, and that anxiety is not necessarily involved. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Dead-Poets-Society/64989/.

Alpaugh, David. "The New Math of Poetry." CHRONICLE REVIEW February 21, 2010.

It's hard to figure out how much poetry is being published in America. When I suggested to Michael Neff, founder of Web del Sol, that anyone can start an online journal for $100, he pointed out that anyone can start one via a blog for nothing. If current trends persist, the sheer amount of poetry "published" is likely to double, quadruple, "ten-tuple" in the decades ahead. Who is writing all this poetry? In quieter times, the art's only significant promoters were English professors who focused on reading poetry for its own sake. Today colleges across America have hundreds of programs devoted to teaching men and women how to actually write the stuff. Those in charge of undergraduate and M.F.A. programs have cast themselves in the role of poetry-writing cheerleaders who are busy assuring tens of thousands of students that they are talented poets who should expect their work not only to be published but to win awards as well. The notion that writing and performing "poetry" is the easiest way to satisfy the American itch for 15 minutes of fame has spilled out of our campuses and into the wider culture. You can't pick up a violin or oboe for the first time on Monday morning and expect to play at Lincoln Center that weekend, but you can write your first poem in May and appear at an open mike in June waving a "chapbook" for sale. The new math of poetry is driven not by reader demand for great or even good poetry but by the demand of myriads of aspiring poets to experience the thrill of "publication." The new math is stunning. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/.

Parini, Jay. "Why Poetry Matters." CHRONICLE June 27, 2008.

Poetry doesn't matter to most people. They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost. One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry. In the 19th century, poets like Scott, Byron, and Longfellow had huge audiences around the world. Their works were best sellers, and they were cultural heroes as well. But readers had few choices in those days. One imagines, perhaps falsely, that people actually liked poetry. It provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings. They enjoyed folk ballads, too. In a sense, music and poetry joined hands. In the 20th century, something went amiss. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=knz7d3nc19g60h47flh19j1pn0dxc4sy.

Wasserstein, Bernard. "Oxford's Poetry Revolution." PROSPECT MAGAZINE 142 (January 2008).

Occasionally an event, in itself trivial, captures the essence of a historical moment: the Boston tea party, the first performance of The Rite of Spring, the incarceration of Paris Hilton. In England, such episodes often take place in Oxford: John Henry Newman’s passage from Anglicanism to Rome in the 1840s; the king and country debate at the Union in 1933; the dons’ rejection of Margaret Thatcher for an honorary degree in 1985. The non-election of Yevgeny Yevtushenko as professor of poetry in Oxford in 1968 was one such incident that somehow fused the cultural switchboard of its time. As I played a minor part in stage managing this mixture of opera buffo and grand guignol, it falls to me to act as—an admittedly prejudiced—recording angel. Yevtushenko’s candidacy was my idea. A history undergraduate at the time, I had read a little of his poetry in translation and also his Precocious Autobiography. He struck me as a raw, individualist voice speaking boldly from within the confines of a conformist society. Some of the lines buzzed in my head. But I confess that my main motive for initiating his candidacy was political, though at the time I strenuously denied it to my fellow campaigners, to the press—and to myself. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9970.