The Lyric Now

A poet and scholar explores how lyric poetry works by examining the lives and works of thirteen twentieth- and twenty-first–century American poets and musicians.

For more than a century, American poets have heeded the siren song of Ezra Pound's make it new, staking a claim for the next poem on the supposed obsolescence of the last. But great poems are forever rehearsing their own present, inviting readers into a nowness that makes itself new each time we read or reread them. They create the...