Critics have long held that, even if Cervantes was at least somewhat aware that his work would be successful, this was only because he knew it was funny, and hoped that, in reading it, as he famously wrote in his first preface to Don Quixote, "the melancholy would be moved to laughter, and the merry made merrier still."

Arabic poetics—the theories of criticism of poetry and eloquence in classical (mediaeval) Arabic scholarship—has a great deal to offer the contemporary reader and critic.

In Gawker's wry estimation, most of the U.S. simply didn't "get" Richard Blanco's inaugural poem "One Today." In the Washington Post's absurd trollgazing account, Blanco's poem merely signals the "death of poetry."

Youth is wasted on the young. Except when it’s wasted for them—by, for example, war.

The formula of the "99 percent" seems at once incredibly rhetorical and real. We are used to hyperbole; we are less used to an absurdly lop-sided figure that is actually matched by a reality. Poetic figuration meets statistical validity.

Michel Houellebecq is quite a character. The bad boy of French letters has made his name building post-humanist novels where dogs and clones are the rare creatures achieving a modicum of happiness.

Whenever a new anthology of modern U.S. poetry comes along, it seems that some distinguished critic or other is fated to take up arms, defending his or her vision of canonical distinction against the treachery of "inclusiveness." The latest eminence to cast herself as such a centurion is Helen Vendler, who reproaches Rita Dove's Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011) in a review that has garnered no shortage of sensational, morbid attention ("Are These the Poems to Remember?," NYRB, November, 2011).

Are you on the record anywhere about Carlos Ramírez Hoffman or Carlos Weider? That was the indelicate question I kept mulling over—and ultimately kept to myself—during the Q and A session after Raúl Zurita's Sept. 26 poetry reading here at Northwestern University, where Zurita was accompanied by his latest translator, Anna Deeny.

Poetic genius is measured, firstly, by a poet's ability to subject time to language. This is, to internally overcome time, or, to be more precise, to overcome what time does to language.

I've been following developments in Filipino rap culture over the past few years, in part because I enjoy listening to rap, but also because there's this fascinating way that the rap battle format has certain similarities to the Filipino tradition of poetic debate called Balagtasan, so that battles in the Philippines incorporate certain elements of that tradition.