Recent Entries:

Jaroslaw Anders emigrated to the United States from Poland in 1981 when he was thirty-one. Since 1984 he has been an editor, writer and producer for Voice of America.

Born in Gliwice in 1946, Julian Kornhauser was a member of the Generation of 1968, the young Polish poets who came after Szymborska, Herbert and Różewicz. With Adam Zagajewski he co-edited “The Unrepresented World” (1974), a collection of essays which served as the group’s manifesto.

The poems in Zero at the Bone, Stacie Cassarino’s highly accomplished first book, emit a sonic calm even -- or especially -- while teasing out the adversities in their subject matter. Her tone modulates between intimate remark and a flatness called out by the weight of the scene.

I read Louise Glück’s poem “Gratitude” for the first time 35 years ago and my initial reaction is still fresh: I’d been exposed.

GRATITUDE

Do not think I am not grateful for your small
kindness to me.
I like small kindnesses.
In fact I actually prefer them to the more
substantial kindness, that is always eying you
like a large animal on a rug,
until your whole life reduces

Historians often mention the Kennedy-Nixon debates or the JFK assassination to mark the emergence of mass media culture. But Nikita Khrushchev’s tour of the U.S. in 1959 transfixed the world for fourteen days during the height of the Cold War.

Dahlia Ravikovitch once said that the value of a poet is worth less than that of a garlic peel. “A slice of bread with butter and honey on an oil cloth-covered breakfast table solves any problem better than an elusive poem,” she remarked in an interview. “What takes me out of the periods of depression that I occasionally succumb to is not poetry, but life.