Adam Fitzgerald is the author of The Late Parade and teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers University. He also directs The Home School. His second collection of poems, George Washington, is forthcoming this fall from W. W. Norton's historic Liveright imprint.

Poetry criticism in our time has suffered a steady marginalization of print attention, to the greater disadvantage of poets, poetry enthusiasts, and the general reader. Even so, the last generation’s kingmakers—Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler—have loosened their grip on reliably championing the newest and most vital contemporary poetry.

Earlier this spring, I had the pleasure of sitting down at an Italian restaurant in the West Village and asking Benjamin Taylor—author of two novels, Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even, and recent editor of Saul Bellow: Letters—about his new book, Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, a genre-bending travelogue that is part memoir, part history, part distillation of how ancient myths continue to shape our inner lives.

Since the late 1980s Jonathan Galassi has been editor-in-chief, President, and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the premier publishing houses based in New York City. But Galassi’s life in letters is even more storied and accomplished.

Last summer, I sat down with Sieburth in a bar in New York and began talking about his career in translation in light of Ashbery’s then-recently released translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Soon, our conversation shifted to arguably the 20th century’s greatest and most influential translator, Ezra Pound.

Adam Fitzgerald edits Maggy Poetry Magazine and teaches poetry at Rutgers University and The New School. He lives in the East Village.

Recently, I sat down to begin an e-mail exchange with Jerry Williams. His latest works include a collection of poetry entitled Admission (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) as well as the highly successful anthology It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Poetry of Breakup (Overlook Press, 2009)

In his eagerly awaited second book, The Cloud Corporation, Timothy Donnelly's poetic evolution and mastery are even more distinct—that is, the poems in this new book, no less enwrapped and intoxicated with rhetoric, fully emerge.

When Robert Lowell accepted a National Book Award in 1960, he conflated contemporary American poetry into an arbitrary division: the cooked and the raw. Pinning the dry academic formalism against the hopheaded, overheated eruptions of the Beats, he was doing more than cartooning actual tendencies and aesthetic divides.