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WILLIAM CORBETT

Latest Articles

Selected and otherwise

A sheaf of post-April poetry and poets
Simic is a poet not of big gloomy poems but of small glooms and fears that haunt our waking lives and disturb our sleep.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | May 13, 2008

Sweet fallout

Philip Whalen’s word bombs
Philip Whalen (1923–2002) is a great American poet.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | January 14, 2008

News to me

Robert Hass’s National Book Award
Notwithstanding the occasional university-press finalist (this year: David Kirby), the National Book Award for poetry is generally open to only a few American poets.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | December 11, 2007

Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place

The best film about an American poet ever made
Ferrini and Riaf present the complex American literary figure Charles Olson in a clear way by focusing not on the facts of his life but on the facts of his work.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | September 12, 2007

What was, and what might have been

Sara and Gerald Murphy in Williamstown
Sara and Gerald Murphy are back, and in the words of their friend Cole Porter, “What a swell party it is.”

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | November 08, 2007

Rhyme schemes

Some 'Poetry Month' bon-bons
In honor of poetry month, these books have been plucked from the torrent.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | April 10, 2007

Howling in Boston

This old towne
A city is small geography — even the City on the Hill, the Athens of America — to merit a poet laureate.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | April 04, 2007

The pro

Robert Crais’s winning formula
During dinner parties nowadays, everyone, writers included, talks about movies. Rarely does a “serious” novel dominate conversation, but crime novels sometimes have a moment.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | February 27, 2007

Just the facts

Frederick Seidel’s odd charms
Ooga-Booga is Frederick Seidel’s 12th book of poetry to appear since 1963. Frederick Seidel reads from Ooga-Booga (mp3)

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | February 13, 2007

Nice shot

Joshua Prager revisits the home run
No home run in baseball history is as famous as Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world.”

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | October 24, 2006

Demon daze

Hart Crane complete
Hart Crane roared through his short, tormented, and doomed life.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | October 03, 2006

All poetry is local

Heaney’s District encompasses the world
The poems achieved are graspable physical objects, not “infinite,” but so wide and so deep, and solid.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | July 11, 2006

Imagining the truth

Filmmaker Robert Gardner’s ‘nonfiction’
Gardner’s work may be fact-based, but this has not crimped his imagination or his ability to tell stories.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | June 07, 2006

Hearsay

One man’s ‘Bush Chronicle’
Eliot Weinberger is a New York editor, translator, anthologist, essayist, and throwback to the day when American literary intellectuals more regularly spoke their political views in print.

By: WILLIAM CORBETT | March 07, 2006

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