What's a poet's best friend if not a dictionary? Poets are makers, etymology teaches us. They build out of words simple and complex, familiar and strange. The marvel of the poem is to be at once ...

Poetry is difficult to recreate in another language, as distinct from literal translation. But here Sergei Roy captures the urgency and tumbling succession of images of Boris Pasternak's original, ...

Over dinner, a friend once asked me a shocking question. What is poetry anyway? Then, even worse, What makes a poem great? He thought I should know, since I presumed to introduce poetry programs on ...