Mark Strand Research Articles

Brief, Undeniable: Lyric Address in Mark Strand

Abstract: This essay balances universalist and historicist approaches to reading lyric through an analysis of the poetry of Mark Strand. The ordering consciousness behind a given poet’s body of work offers an avenue to understanding Strand’s work and lyric more generally. Textual rather than biographical, this “lyric self” manifests the twin functions of the lyric poem, to challenge death and to reach out to the reader. Developments in late modernity have occasioned a turn from a self-enclosed mimetic model of lyric to a rhetorical one conscious of audience. Strand’s awareness of this change and his position relative to it assigns him a paradoxical vision of lyric, one that inscribes a self and communicates with the reader but simultaneously questions the potential and value of doing so. A close reading of Strand’s work reveals how his poems balance motivations fundamental to lyric form against the philosophical commitments of secular modernity.

“The night is warm and clear…”: Mark Strand e Leopardi

L'article analyse la relation entre le poète américain Mark Strand (1934-2014) et la poésie de Giacomo Leopardi, en se concentrant en particulier sur une réécriture de La sera del dì di festa, par laquelle Strand a clôturé une anthologie de ses propres vers intitulée Selected poems et publiée en 1980.

Lucky Form of Truth

This article explores poet Mark Strand’s facet as an art critic and, more specifically, the way in which the pictorial universe of American painter Edward Hopper influenced his own poetry, both thematically and stylistically. Reading Hopper’s well-known oil on canvas House by the Railroad (1925) in a New York Times article entitled “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World,” published on 17 October 1971, Strand dwells on “Hopper’s fascination with passage” (340). Years later, he would expand his critical exegesis of House by the Railroad and other canvasses by the American painter in a book-length essay titled Hopper (1994) in ways that are expressive of his own poetics. Both Strand and Hopper look at the world with an inquisitive gaze and capture moments in time with utter clarity to show that the self is a mystery and humans are transients yearning for a moment of revelation, a momentary stay against confusion.

Lucky Form of Truth

This article explores poet Mark Strand’s facet as an art critic and, more specifically, the way in which the pictorial universe of American painter Edward Hopper influenced his own poetry, both thematically and stylistically. Reading Hopper’s well-known oil on canvas House by the Railroad (1925) in a New York Times article entitled “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World,” published on 17 October 1971, Strand dwells on “Hopper’s fascination with passage” (340). Years later, he would expand his critical exegesis of House by the Railroad and other canvasses by the American painter in a book-length essay titled Hopper (1994) in ways that are expressive of his own poetics. Both Strand and Hopper look at the world with an inquisitive gaze and capture moments in time with utter clarity to show that the self is a mystery and humans are transients yearning for a moment of revelation, a momentary stay against confusion.

“It is you who must be translated”: Translational Immortality and Mark Strand’s The Monument

This study primarily surveys one work, Mark Strand’s The Monument (1978), though it is also a glimpse into translational immortality and authors’ relationships to their own afterlife, their legacy, and their (im)mortality. We will turn to other fictional translation scenarios in Strand’s work, and ideas emerging from interviews, but our analysis will focus largely on the ways the text at hand represents author-translator relations, the self in translation, including its intertextuality, translational immortality, and the notion of monumentality in the verbal arts.

Minor preoccupations, major endeavors: The community of poets and painters

In Au fond des images (2003), Jean-Luc Nancy introduces concepts about the image, pertinent to understanding the minor genre of poets’ writings on painting. Nancy begins by stating that the image is sacred, clarifying that the sacred should not be confused with the religious, which is based on rituals. The sacred signifies that which is separated, excluded, distanced. The image’s attraction is derived from this, from its untouchable nature. Because of its separation from the viewer, the image inspires a desire for intimacy, and draws the spectator to it. Poets’ texts on painting constitute minor forms: prefaces to catalogs, criticism, or poems that are verbal transpositions of visual objects ( ekphrasis). These minor forms often express major preoccupations. In this essay, we address Mark Strand, Michel Deguy, Nicolas Pesquès, Yves Bonnefoy, and T. Alan Broughton from this perspective of a desire for contact in their efforts to develop their aesthetic and ethical principles through the gaze.

Fitting Memorials for Seamus Heaney: Irish Poets’ Elegies and Elegiac Tributes

Fitting Memorials for Seamus Heaney: Irish Poets’ Elegies and Elegiac Tributes Joseph Heininger (bio) To say death is regrettable is only saying something about death, but to communicate that feeling is saying something about life. bernard o’donoghue In a remarkable gift of literary and cultural enrichment, many Irish poets have written elegies and elegiac poems for Seamus Heaney. His death on August 30, 2013, in Dublin was mourned throughout the world, and in response, Irish poets have written memorable elegies. Rather than adhere closely to elegy’s traditional conventions, however, Irish poets have reshaped the genre’s forms and techniques so that greater breadth, depth, and thematic reach distinguish their elegies. Among these poets are Michael Longley, Kerry Hardie, Theo Dorgan, Eamon Grennan, Paddy Bushe, Mark Roper, Bernard O’Donoghue, Sean Lysaght, and Leontia Flynn. I have selected their elegies because they offer significant perspectives on the art of contemporary Irish elegists. Each poet memorializes Seamus Heaney by remaking elegiac conventions in innovative and varied ways. Outstanding elegies have also been written by Michael Coady, John F. Deane, Katie Donovan, Thomas McCarthy, Ignatius McGovern, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, among others. Before examining some of the Irish elegies, I shall discuss the critical contexts for my inquiry. In The English Elegy, Peter Sacks points out the traditional subjects and forms for elegy: wanting to deny the fact of death; praise for the person’s attributes and virtues; pastoral or antipastoral imagery; personal lament and spoken loss; communal mourning and rituals of lamentation; and use of the pathetic fallacy.1 The contributors to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics also state: “Traditionally, the functions of the elegy were three, to lament, praise, and console. All are responses to the experience of loss: lament, by expressing grief and deprivation; praise, by idealizing the deceased and preserving her or [End Page 105] his memory among the living; and consolation, by finding solace in meditation on natural continuances or on moral, metaphysical, and religious values.”2 Historically, after John Milton’s “Lycidas” and Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” the English elegy may or may not address whether hope or consolation can be found amidst grief and shaken faith, or lost faith. This difficulty in finding any kind of consolation or hope is also true of the contemporary Irish elegy. The traditional elegiac conventions are incorporated in many Irish elegies but with an emphasis on Irish features, genealogies, and idioms. Whether in Irish or English, Irish elegies demonstrate elegy’s importance in expressing what Eavan Boland and Mark Strand designate as a “cultural grief ” together with private grief: “In the traditional elegy, the grief the poet expresses is rarely a private one. More often, it is a cultural grief. . . . That the elegy speaks to this, that it locates the cultural customs of death in whichever society it occurs, adds greatly to its power.”3 In his influential study of Heaney’s elegies, Jahan Ramazani positions the work of several Irish poets: “While questioning, analyzing, and even attacking the elegy’s major subgenres and conventions, Heaney—together with such Irish contemporaries as John Montague, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon—energetically reclaims them for our time.”4 I endorse the idea that “the best elegies will always be sites of struggle between custom and decorum on the one hand, and private feeling on the other.” I do not agree, however, with the contention that Heaney and his contemporaries attack and subvert elegy’s conventions and subgenres; this critical position overstates the case. Peter Sacks concludes his study with a discussion of W. B. Yeats’s “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.” He places Yeats within the English tradition, yet his study also prompts the question whether Yeats’s elegy belongs instead to an Irish tradition of cultural elegy and lamentation. Yeats invokes John Synge and George Pollexfen as Irish exemplars akin to Robert Gregory, and hews to English tradition by holding up the image of Robert Gregory to his Renaissance likeness, Sir Philip Sidney: “our Sidney and our perfect man.” Yeats’s poem accommodates personal lamentation and cultural elegy, and this joint impetus shows the excellence of the modern Irish elegy...

The Audible Light of Words: Mark Strand on Poetry and the Self

The aim of this paper is to look at American poet Mark Strand’s thinking about what poetry is all about, as expressed in his poetry collections and prose works, especially in The Monument (1978), a book of “notes, observations, rants, and revelations” about literary immortality, but also a meditation on “the translation of a self, and the text as self, the self as book”; in The Continuous Life (1990), a collection of luminous pieces on various aspects of the literary enterprise, including reading, translation and the multitude of selves making up the self; and in The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention (2000), a collection of insightful essays in which the poet discusses the essentials of poetry as something made by the human imagination, the meaning or content of a poem, and the creative process with the guidance of such preeminent minds as those of Carl Jung, Paul Valéry and Wallace Stevens.

METRE-MAKING ARGUMENTSA Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. By Robert Hass

Near the end of Robert Hass’s not-so-little handbook on poetry is a chapter titled ‘Difficult Forms’. We might expect a discourse about the sestina, the canzone, or at least the Spenserian stanza, but Hass has an altogether more ambitious project in mind. Nodding to other poetry manuals (for praise he singles out An Exaltation of Forms by Annie Finch and The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland), Hass clarifies that his entry will not so much explain how to write in traditional and emergent verse patterns as it will interrogate ‘the essential expressive gestures inside those forms’ and ‘the persistence of those shapes of thought and feeling’. And yet the chapter in question finds Hass wary of pronouncing discrete categories of ‘formal imagination’ that may inhere in different verse structures. This reticence, or reluctance, betrays him into shrugging off the enormous challenge he had assigned himself in the book’s opening pages. Acknowledging that poetic form is often discussed ‘as if it meant the set of preconditions that made a kind of container for the writing’, he offers this corrective: ‘in the deeper meaning of the term [form], every sonnet has its own form. Every poem is its own form’. Well, thanks a lot. Happily, he doesn’t rest his argument here. It turns out that, for Hass, ‘the heart of the formal experience of the poem’ is occupied by ‘the sentences of the poem, their shape, their relation to line and stanza pattern’. (Elsewhere, in one of many gnomic statements that populate this guide, Hass declares: ‘The hidden paradigm of the single line is the completed sentence, without which idea there would be no enjambment’.)

Poetry Today: After the Secrets, the Colors: Between the Material and the Abstract in Mark Strand's Collages

Poetry Today: After the Secrets, the Colors: Between the Material and the Abstract in Mark Strand's Collages

Survey Review of a Year's Essays on Stevens

Reviewed by: Survey Review of a Year's Essays on Stevens Jason D. Stevens Survey Review of a Year's Essays on Stevens "From This the Poem Springs": Difficulty, Affect, Spaces, and Borders in Recent Stevens Criticism In "Frontiers of Writing," the essay that concludes The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney pays Wallace Stevens a compliment of the highest order when, speaking of the Loyalist majority in Northern Ireland, he claims that "everything and everybody would be helped were they to make their imagination press back against the pressure of reality and re-enter the whole country of Ireland imaginatively, if not constitutionally, through the northern point of the quincunx" (202). Heaney's ideas of reorder forge a direct link between Stevens's understanding of the imagination-reality complex and Heaney's own understanding of the relationship of writing to place (the northern quincunx being one of the five points of Ireland's places of writing he discusses in The Place of Writing). In making this link, they also foreground the major themes of many of the most engaging pieces of Stevens scholarship from the past year that I review here. Heaney's hopes for the imaginative integration of Ireland suggest that the challenge of realizing this new, borderless space lies precisely where Andrew Osborn, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, claims that poetic difficulty itself is located: "at the juncture between thought and feeling." Heaney understood all too well the extent to which affective drives press back (often violently) against what citizens might "know" would make for better actual conditions. Pairing Heaney and Stevens illustrates some ways in which the material in this review (though not all of it) might be thought of in relation to recent scholarship on Stevens that has tended to focus on contextual and comparative strategies. While some of the pieces I read in this year's survey of Stevens scholarship take a strictly thematic approach to Stevens's work, many attempt to trace divides and to navigate difficult spaces through more typical acts of comparison and contextualization. Most do both. Difficulty, affect, spaces, and borders, with their implications of crossings and encounters, point up the specifically Stevensian juncture of difficulty, one that Cody Deitz claims, in his brief article "The Absent Center: Poetic Difficulty in Wallace Stevens's 'Man with a [sic] Blue Guitar XXII,'" is found in Stevens's phrase "the universal intercourse" (CPP 145), which "stand[s] in for the larger metaphysical exchange the poem represents" (Deitz 158). Indeed, readers of this journal might recall that almost all of the essays in the Fall 2017 Special Issue touched in one way or another on difficulty in Stevens's poetry and the subsequent challenge of helping students navigate the aesthetic spaces they encounter there. Difficulty, to return to Andrew Osborn's definition, is "Resistance to swift and confident interpretation . . . experienced at the juncture of thought and feeling." Teaching Stevens, both in literature classes and in poetry writing workshops, has taught me that he is one of the best poets for instilling in students the virtues of slow and tentative interpretation. This is so because if the difficulty of his poetry is immediate, so, too, is the delight. Enjoyment is not deferred until students conquer the difficulty [End Page 281] and finally "get" the poem. They can revel in the sounds and strange metaphors even as they are bewildered by them. Davide Castiglione's article "Difficult Poetry Processing: Reading Times and the Narrativity Hypothesis" could have fit well with the Wallace Stevens Journal issue on teaching Stevens. Castiglione reports the results of an empirical reading test using E-prime reading speed software. First-year students from the University of Nottingham were given texts to read by Ezra Pound, Mark Strand, Jeremy Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe, J. G. Ballard, and Stevens ("What We See Is What We Think"). The result was, not surprisingly, that non-narrative poems like Stevens's had the longest reading times (Howe's text registered the longest average reading time, with Prynne second, and Stevens third) (116). Castiglione's aim was to explore empirical dimensions of stylistic difficulty and so "to work backward from effect to structure" (117...

Difficult poetry processing: Reading times and the narrativity hypothesis

This study presents an experiment that uses reading times as a measure of the processing effort demanded by ‘difficult’ poems, where difficulty is defined as a text-driven response phenomenon associated with resistance to reading fluency. Reading times have been used before to explore the processing of literature, but seldom with the aim of shedding light on difficulty. There is then scope to redress this research gap, also in light of Shklovsky’s claim that the technique of art is ‘to increase the difficulty and length of perception’. In the current experiment, a group of participants read six poems on-screen. The poems are by Mark Strand, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe and Jeremy Prynne, and have been selected based on critics’ remarks on their difficulty or lack thereof. An extract from a novel by JG Ballard was also included to find out how its narrativity would compare, in processing terms, to the more elliptical narrativity of Strand’s and Pound’s poems. The time spent on each line was recorded by software E-Prime, commonly used in psycholinguistics. The results indicate that three of these texts – Ballard’s, Strand’s and Pound’s – were read at a much higher speed than non-narrative poems by Stevens, Hill, Prynne and Howe. The proposed explanation was that it is sufficient for readers to recognize traces of a narrative schema to read the text fluently, even if such text is low in coherence. By contrast, when prototypical narrative features cannot be mapped onto a text, the processing effort as measured by reading times remarkably increases. Overall, the results refine our understanding of the relationship between difficulty and the stylistic strategies associated with it.

S Is for Something: Mark Strand and Artistic Identity

S Is for Something: Mark Strand and Artistic Identity

Orison

Orison Sasha Pimentel (bio) Dhahran, Saudi Arabia Horizon: a tinged yolk in measureless dark, the city lifting with prayer. At the seam, the black earth sharpens its edges. Voices move bodies up and down, salah of slow marionettes, and lips pry open the bright teeth, the undulant throat. These are not words of asking, like bring her back, or Lord, let fallwater—rather, a divining of intersections: palm to knee, forehead to soil, man and God, Allah-hu— roof tile to light. The stomach gurgles, signaling hunger. Limbs shrink under white cotton. Day breaks on a carpet of crowns, the napes below them glistening. Later, a man clips an iris, readying for death. A woman loses herself in her daughter’s face. The sun hardens, starching the sky with her white collar, and the tongue retreats, having forgotten its vibrant state. [End Page 146] Sasha Pimentel Sasha Pimentel, born in Manila and raised in the US and Saudi Arabia, is a Filipina poet and author of Insides She Swallowed (West End Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 American Book Award. She was selected by Philip Levine, Mark Strand, and Charles Wright as a finalist for the 2015 Rome Prize in Literature and was a Philip Levine fellow at CSU-Fresno. Her work has been published in such journals as American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, and Callaloo. She is an assistant professor in a bilingual MFA program in Creative Writing on the border of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Copyright © 2015 Middlebury College Publications

Islands and Other Works

Islands and Other Works Mark Strand (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Eight Islands, 1998, aquatint and etching, Somerset soft white paper, 26 1/2 × 28 1/2 inches, edition of 20. Courtesy Harlan & Weaver, Inc., New York. [End Page Plate2] Click for larger view View full resolution Sea with Islands, 1998, aquatint and etching, Somerset soft white paper, 26 1/2 × 28 1/2 inches, edition of 20. Courtesy Harlan & Weaver, Inc., New York. [End Page Plate3] Click for larger view View full resolution A Few Bright Stars, 1999, monotype, 29 × 38 inches. Courtesy Goya Contemporary Gallery, Copyright Mark Strand, published by Goya-Girl Press. [End Page Plate4] Click for larger view View full resolution Island II, 1997, lithograph, 22 1/4 × 22 inches, edition of 25. Courtesy Goya Contemporary Gallery, Copyright Mark Strand, published by Goya-Girl Press. [End Page Plate5] Click for larger view View full resolution Two Dark Islands, 1998, etching, Somerset soft white paper, 11 3/4 × 12 1/2 inches, edition of 20. Courtesy Harlan & Weaver, Inc., New York. [End Page Plate6] Click for larger view View full resolution A Cloud with a Story, 1999, monotype, 38 × 29 inches. Courtesy Goya Contemporary Gallery, Copyright Mark Strand, published by Goya-Girl Press. [End Page Plate7] Click for larger view View full resolution The Golden Frogs of Panama, 2009 (detail), direct gravure, Hahnemühle bright white paper 20 3/4 × 31 inches, edition of 20. Courtesy Harlan & Weaver, Inc., New York. [End Page Plate8] Mark Strand MARK STRAND’s most recent collection of poems is Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). Copyright © 2014 Mark Strand

Tunnel Vision: A Cybertextual Interpretation of Mark Strand's The Tunnel

Tunnel Vision: A Cybertextual Interpretation of Mark Strand's The Tunnel

Anti-Romanticism in Mark Strand's DARK HARBOR XXXIV

Anti-Romanticism in Mark Strand's DARK HARBOR XXXIV

Metaphysical Suspicions: Charles Simic as Agnostic Theologian

This essay argues that through his poetry, Charles Simic navigates a personal via mystica, one that by its very nature must always remain a penultimate affair. In order to reach this conclusion, the essay first demonstrates the affinities between Simic's work and that of the Christian mystical tradition. Secondly, the essay shows how Simic's work navigates the linguistic and philosophical tensions that exist between medieval and postmodern deconstructive forms of negation. Finally, Simic's use of negation is set into the broader context of contemporary poetry through comparisons to the work of Charles Wright and Mark Strand.

Daniela S. Hristova In Memoriam

It is with an enormous sense of loss that we reflect on the untimely death of Daniela S. Hristova on October 10, 2010. Daniela passed away after an extremely brief battle with cancer, at the age of 48. At the time of her death, Daniela was employed as a Temporary Lecturer in the Department of Slavonic Languages at the University of Cambridge. She was visiting her native Bulgaria, on her way from her home in Chicago back to England, and died shortly after being diagnosed. Daniela's sudden death was a great shock to all who knew her. Daniela was born on September 5, 1962, in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. She completed her B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Sofia, and also studied Slavic Philology in Prague before moving to Chicago with her husband Vladimir Tchernev and their son Ivo. Daniela did her subsequent graduate work at the University of Chicago, working under the directorship of Bill Darden and defending her doctoral dissertation in 2002 on Grammatical function and syntactic structure: The participles in the Kievan Chronicle. She was then hired to teach in Chicago's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, where she remained for five years. During her Chicago period, Daniela also developed close ties with the Slavic Department at Harvard. As a graduate student, she had participated in the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute program in the summer of 1999. She then spent 1999-2000 as a visiting scholar, taking advanced Slavic linguistics courses with Michael Flier and pursuing her doctoral research on historical East Slavic syntax. Daniela also spent 2005-06 at Harvard, having been awarded a Eugene and Daymel Shklar fellowship for the fall to conduct research at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and teaching graduate courses in the spring of 2006. In the fall of 2008 she accepted a position at Cambridge, teaching courses in historical Slavic linguistics. Daniela pursued a variety of professional activities as a developing scholar. In 1999 her first English publication appeared in these very pages (JSL 7(2): 171-78). This was a Reflections piece entitled Total Fears, in honor of her favorite Czech author Bohumil Hrabal and which described the unusual combination of challenges facing a returning woman graduate student and Bulgarian emigre. Around that time she also launched a publishing venture called the Aleko Society (Obstestvo Aleko', in honor of a much earlier Bulgarian with a Chicago connection, Aleko Konstantinov), which published translated collections by award-winning poet Mark Strand, then at the University of Chicago. Another scholarly venture to which Daniela was dedicated was the Norwegian Landslide of the Norm project, which studies interrelations between linguistic liberalization and literary development in Russia during the post-Revolutionary years of the 1920s and the post-Soviet period of the 1990s. …

Edmund Gosse and the Stubborn Villanelle Blunder

Contemporary American poets do not care for Victorian poetry. For evidence of this assertion we might look at the November/December 2007 issue of The American Poetry Review: What trace of the Victorian, if any, do we see? Paul Muldoon, an Irish transplant, vouchsafes an interview about Byron (Romantic, not Victorian, but nineteenth-century at least.) (1) A poem by Stefi Weisburd titled Descent of Man would have been impossible without Lyell and Darwin (not poetry, but Victorian); it mentions neither those Victorian scientists nor the pregnant contemporary phrase intelligent design, but their influence is obvious: Vestigial footprints, of human, of beast/score the earth like musical notes, / and what a beautiful score it is, only / the believers are too hoarse to sing. (2) Half of almost every page is blocked off for advertisements for new collections, editions, works of criticism, and creative writing programs, and these include a notice for a Bilingual 50th Anniversary Edition of C. F. Macintyre's Symbolist Poetry and an epigraph by Flaubert gracing the advertisement for the James A. Michener Center for Writers MFA in Writing (France, not Britain). The many prizes are named after modernists: the 2007 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, The Robinson Jeffers Tor House 2008 Prize for Poetry, the W. B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Ira Sadoff's History Matters: A Minority Report mentions James Wright, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Emily Dickinson. Reginald Gibbons's essay On Apophatic Poetics mentions Catullus, Aquinas, Horace, Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Andrei Voznesensky, and Emily Dickinson--the last apparently a blow for the nineteenth century, but American. Yet Victorian Aestheticism has left accidental, unremarked, but decided traces on the landscape of contemporary American poetry in the French forms, especially the villanelle, which Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Reading and Writing Metrical Verse defines as follows: A poem of nineteen lines, set out in five tercets and a final quatrain. The poem works on only two rhymes; the first line and the third line of the initial stanza are repeated, exactly or almost exactly, throughout the rest of the stanzas, as follows: a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a,a. (3) The villanelles and triolets and rondeaux and ballades beloved of the Aesthetes were endangered for most of the twentieth century, but the villanelle in particular is now a common animal in the biome of contemporary American poetry. Its nineteen lines, its five tercets and single quatrain, its two rhymes and two alternating refrains habitually appear in anthologies and little magazines and MFA theses and Collected Works. Although our sample issue of The American Poetry Review does not itself house an example, the catalogs of names that appear in every advertisement of a poetry program or event will inevitably include burnished contemporary American poets who have written villanelles. The full-page advertisement for the 2008 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference and Bookfair has the wherewithal to print pictures, not just names, of the enticing authors who will be there: excluding the prose writers, the list consists of Sonia Sanchez, James Tate, Yusef Komunyakaa, Louise Gluck, Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, and Natasha Trethewey. Mark Strand's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 collection Blizzard of One included the double villanelle Two de Chiricos for Harry Ford, and in 2000 Strand co-edited The Making of a Poem: A Northon Anthology of Poetic Forms, which began with a long entry on the villanelle. Natasha Trethewey also won the Pulitzer for her 2006 Native Guard, which includes the altered villanelle Myth. (4) The other poets attending the 2008 AWP conference might eschew the writing of a villanelle, but they do not ignore it. …