One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats’s odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire to learn from the bardic tradition that continued in the...

Hearing that the same men who brought us ‘South Park’ were mounting a musical to be called ‘The Book of Mormon,’ we were tempted to turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.

Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a sense that the site and the occasion demand a form...

A cabaret song has got to be written – for the middle voice, ideally – because you’ve got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act,...

An aria in an opera – Handel’s ‘Ombra mai fu,’ for example – gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That’s the beauty...

The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.

The term ‘epitaph’ itself means ‘something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb.’ When an epitaph is a poem written for a tomb, and appears in a book, we are aware...