Rick Benjamin says the threshold instruction of most good poems is: slow down, be alert, wake up. The reason to write poetry is to be of use, he says. The reason to read poetry is that it might change your life.

In our series "whose words these are,"...

Robin Kelley's superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my reading year to a blessedly loving, gorgeously swinging, dissonant, modernist, and utterly one-off climactic note. There may be another jazz biography as thickly detailed, as...

Gordon Wood, the wonderfully plain-spoken Pulitzer and Bancroft prize historian at Brown, thinks that Thomas Jefferson would find Barack Obama obnoxiously, over-reachingly Hamiltonian... and that Alexander Hamilton would likewise dismiss Obama as a Jefferson dreamer.

Empire of Liberty is the title of Gordon Wood's magisterial new history of the...

Sir Andrew Motion succeeded Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson and, immediately, Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He can sound like the elegist of rural old imperial England, but he can sting in the present tense too, on matters from Princess Di to the "scream of rocket-burn" in...

Orhan Pamuk in his six Norton Lectures at Harvard this fall filled the air with ideas about fiction. "The novel is not about the characters but about their world," for example, part of the reason that Pamuk has never titled a book with a character's name. (No disrespect...

Keith Waldrop, who just won the National Book Award in poetry for his Transcendental Studies, is a quilter in phrases. He eschews any intention or meaning that you could point to in his work. He makes statements here and there, but his poetry, he's said, is about "having...

Suketu Mehta, the master storyteller of modern Bombay, learned by listening -- to the runaway poet from Bihar, for example, who wanted him to write a book titled "Untold Stories" or "Untellable Stories," like his own.

Suketu Mehta went home to India to track the migration --...

Rana Dasgupta's India is a land of grueling poverty still, in a culture transfixed by glittering wealth. The dominant mood is "frenzied accumulation" in a society "consumed both by euphoria and dread." Mahatma Gandhi's India of fond memory -- triumphant non-violence and democratic socialism in a nation of villages...

The poet Henri Cole got his French first name from his Armenian mother. From his father, a military man, he got his Southern speech and, in what sounds like sadness and irony, "a knack for solitude." Poetry was the place where as a young gay man he worked through...

Nicholson Baker bursts into our poetry series with a passion for form, a longing for four-beat rhythms a la Kipling and rhymes of the kind that Ira Gershwin and Dr. Seuss learned from Swinburne. For a couple of months now we've been puzzling: what's it like to...

It's a measure of the change in the discourse that David Bromwich, Yale's Sterling Professor of English who used to write op-ed in the New York Times, now keeps a sort of Times Watch in the Huffington Post, the New York Review of Books, and the London...

John Updike had every kind of grace about him, including for me an aura of divine blessing. I liked his religious inquiries better than the Rabbit books -- novels like A Month of Sundays, Roger's Version and The Beauty of the Lilies, and of course stories...

It's been a pleasure all weekend to picture Norman Mailer finally meeting the Maker he's been courting so originally, so well, these many years. There was a theologian inside the novelist, I presumed to say in this last conversation in the spring. And then in just the last few weeks...

It's a melancholy business this Fourth-of-July week to think hard about patriotism and love of country in the context of our war in Iraq. But somebody's got to do it. What do the real patriots say? Here's one:

"We were to relieve them from... tyranny... to enable them to...