“It puzzles me that people say my work is difficult. If you read it, it’s very simple.”

“People loved to talk about how Frank O’Hara didn’t really care about getting published. That doesn’t jibe with my experience.”

I felt like a ghost in the green hybrid, driving slowly around Marfa in the dark. It was my first night there: Michael, the caretaker of the residency houses, who was also a painter, had picked me up at the El Paso airport that afternoon and driven me in amicable silence for three hours through the high desert until we reached the little house at 308 North Plateau Street; I remember the address (you can drag the pegman icon onto the Google map and walk around the neighborhood on Street View, floating above yourself like a ghost; I’m doing that in a separate window now) because I had to have my beta-blockers mailed there twice during the residency, pills I take to reduce the ­vigor of my heart’s contractions, and which have the para­­doxical effect of causing a minor tremor in my hand.

Before I pressed the up button on the elevator, I saw my reflection in the shiny metal doors and said to myself, maybe even mouthed some of the words, Take the elevator back down and leave this building and never return.

Love brought these readers into the world
The cuplike structures
of their eyes were formed

As a child, my hand closed over a centipede,
There was a penny in my mouth

Our children do not mean
Their numbers are up, the fireflies
To kill them when they cup

          The light that changes
the light that goes out

Tonight I can’t remember why
everything is permitted or, 
what amounts to the same thing,

What if I made you hear this as music
But not how you mean that. The slow beam

In my day, we knew how to drown plausibly, 
to renounce the body’s seven claims to buoyancy. In my day, 
our fragrances had agency, our exhausted clocks complained 

“I’d planned to write about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems in time for the centenary of his birth last November, but”

“The oceans were thirty-seven degrees…we still have the mirror of that in our liver. The liver has the same acidity as these oceans, the same amount of salt.“

On Keith Waldrop.Keith Waldrop is a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet. His accomplishment is difficult to describe because his work refuses, in Bartleby-like fashion, the twin traps of impassivity and affectation: “On my one hand, / stasis …

Last night, Pioneer Works, an artists’ space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, hosted a celebration of John Ashbery, who turned eighty-eight this year. The poets Geoffery G. O’Brien, Mónica de la Torre, and John Yau read some of their work and their favori…

The following images of paper flowers, constructed and photographed by Thomas Demand, are based on a detail from a news photo of Katherine Russell, widow of th eBoston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. These images, and the accompanying poems by Ben Lerner, are part of a larger cycle, Blossom, which will be published in book form this summer.